


raze the sanctuary

by marketchippie



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Adultery, Canon Timeline, F/M, Friendmance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-06-01 12:13:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 40,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6518878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marketchippie/pseuds/marketchippie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A marriage of impulse; two sisters, one free and one trapped; one erstwhile prince fleeing his duty and taking refuge in his Chantry vows.</p><p>Arguably a villain origin story. Arguably three.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. MARRIAGE

**Author's Note:**

> Canon compliant within a Marian Hawke-Sebastian friendmance timeline, more or less. I'll be dealing with DLC material, which as we know can go into the story just about anywhere, and I have meddled with the timeline some (pushed up the marriage, mostly), but canon's big plot events will all be here and essentially in the same order.

**** _“I still don’t understand why Hawke married him in the first place.” Isabela rolls her neck, her hair falling loose over her shoulders beneath the salt-grimed silk of her kerchief. A picture image, the very dream of what a man or woman might hope to find when they knocked through the doors of the Hanged Man._

_“Sure you do,” says Varric, and she flicks a hand, sets her rings to jingling._

_“Oh, I get the appeal. You know I read_ The Maker’s Hands _until it fell apart in my hands—liked it better than_ A Member of the Faith _myself—the appeal of the shining Brother’s more than clear. And he’s such a lovely specimen. The hands alone, deft with a bow, raised in prayer. I could think of something different to do with each knuckle.”_

_“At once?”_

_“Why not?”_

_“You put us all to shame.”_

_And she does. Makes a magnificent picture by firelight, candlelight. Upstages him, really. But she hasn’t taken the story out of his hands, not yet, even if the whole Hanged Man has its eyes on her. That helps more than it hurts. Where there are watching eyes, there are listening ears._

_“The trick is not to have any,” she says. “Which is what I’m saying. There are better ways to get your knees sore than kneeling at the altar. And nobody ever needed to tell Hawke that.”_

_It’s only them tonight, in the din and splash and muffled fist-thump they call home. They are not gathered, for Hawke is not here. Hawke, at home in Hightown, now, locked in and fuming. Varric feels her absence like the first pinprick pain of a stab wound, is waiting to see how far it goes, how deep she pushes._

_He lays down his cards. This hand isn’t getting him anywhere._

_“That’s not it,” he says. “More than anything, our Hawke likes winning. But she should never have let Choirboy set the terms of the game.”_

 

* * *

 

A thousand things had gone wrong, in that a thousand things had gone right.

Marian Hawke saw the sun shining off Sebastian Vael’s armor, the way his arrow arced clean through the air, and he’d been hers. Simple as that. Oh, she’d had to kill a handful of mercenaries to get back to him, but she’d done it. For the light, the clean lines, the piercing blue eyes. Varric’s jokes about handsome princes notwithstanding—that had always been more Bethany’s line of dreaming.

For Marian’s part, she’d never needed a prince, not when she could cut a man’s throat before she was twelve, not when she and Carver had grown up with their blades unsheathed back to back. Standing between Bethany and danger. Standing on the lip of the hungry world.

She’s loved that all her life—not quite the fight, per se, but the fighting _back_ , the fighting _for_ , the reasons. Having a life worth spilling blood over. Carver, the last honorable fighter in the Hawke line, had fallen and she couldn’t look back, had given that grief to Bethany and their mother for safekeeping. She had them to keep, first. And a world to—if not to claim, then to fight for, to slice through, to make hers.

Hers, Kirkwall, peopled with her and hers: Isabela, salt in her hair, Varric and the coin-slide of a free drink at the Hanged Man, Merrill’s questions and Fenris’s qualms and Anders pushing the light back under his skin just long enough to make a soft joke and set a plate of milk out for the cats. They’d come to her, in the end. All of them. And they stayed.

Sebastian Vael, prince of Starkhaven and brother of the faith, was never something she had dreamed of. Yet here he was: a new challenge, a new story, and the full lines of his mouth? Delicious. The Chantry was unexplored ground, not that Grand Cleric Elthina was happy to have her there like this, tracking grit and mud in on the soles of her boots. But new is new, and it smelled of candles and incense in a way that rang familiar. That called her, not home but sideways. If the Circle hadn’t smelled so Maker-taken _cold_ it might have smelled a bit like that. If the Gallows hadn’t seemed like the stones were hollow, like the building itself had been made Tranquil. Cut off from Kirkwall life indeed.

But Bethany wrote that she was happy there, hadn’t she, so there was no reason to go back. If the Chantry got her thinking of the Gallows that could only be good for Bethany, who had always found it consoling to bow her head and clasp her hands and listen to the Chantry’s particular three-chorded echoing songs. So Bethany could be happy in the cold rock, sure. Of course she could, Bethany who lit up everywhere she went, warmed every room. Marian could keep her horror to herself, dammed up in the pit of her stomach. No reason to linger in its halls. To seek more than what she found. Every time she left, she left wanting to bathe, either in hot-scalded bathing-water or in the salt filth of the harbor’s sea. One or the other, with nothing in the middle.

She hadn’t seen Bethany, but she took her cues here as best she could. Bit her tongue, for the benefit of the pretty prince, and didn’t spit in the Grand Cleric’s eye as much as her companions wanted her to. They’d been shocked by her mildness. Just shocked. They’d gone in expecting her to make a scene. Varric had felt _denied_.

But Vael’s eyes, wonderfully blue, had lit up for her, and that was a game won, the same game as always. He offered his bow to her, same victory. She’d raised her fingertip, in a darkened corner, to trace beneath the line of his lower lip, same victory lap. She’d been smiling. It had been fun.

Until he’d stepped back, and then it hadn’t.

But she’d seen the look. In those clear blue eyes, which had gone just a little muddy. In the deep hoods of his eyelids, the soft flick of his lashes. The promise of fallibility, same as the rest of them— _just_ like her, with her blood up, her hands itching to unbuckle his myriad buckles, Andraste first.

So, there was the quest, revealing itself to her as they always did. She fixed Kirkwall’s problems. Had sworn her blades to that, as her companions had to her. Everyone was married to some higher purpose, even—especially—the ones that swore up and down they loved nothing more than themselves.

  


_“Is that for me, dwarf?”_

_“My dear, it was for me. I only have to love one thing. I thought you said you loved six?”_

 

Stood to reason, then. All her liars and thieves and bedfellows had principles under their skin; those that wore their principles on the outside had to pack their lies and their desires beneath.

There was a problem in Kirkwall, and she’d fix it. Bring what was dark to the light. Dark. Ruinous. Throbbing—

  


_“All right, all right, Rivaini. Let’s not spend ourselves before we begin.”_

_“You underestimate me. You think I can’t keep going all night?”_

 

So she’d gotten caught up.

People had said worse things, more unbelievable things to Marian Hawke than _marry me_ , than _Her Grace will accept you as a sister in faith_. She’d grinned, laughed, pressed her toe to the toe of his boot. “Sure,” she’d said. “Sure, she will. Of course. Try her.”

She hadn’t counted on Sebastian, whose silver tongue had stayed as polished as his armor over the years, burnished by the Maker’s own Light. Hadn’t counted on his bargaining and his determination. On how good it must have felt, while she awaited for her own satisfactory on-to-the-next-thing ending, for him to win. This was a victory.

She’d gone to the altar still waiting for the joke to finish. Hadn’t realized until their hands were clasped—in prayer rather than passion, with Elthina chaperoning the joining in His good name—that it had been serious all along.

 

 

 

The words had spilled out of him as though he’d been possessed, and later he wondered if Andraste had felt the same. The overwhelming, rolling force that passed through him, heart working his tongue with no time at all to tell his brain along the way. But faith didn’t need thoughts, and there were pretexts for what he said. Marriage without sin, without sacrifice. Hawke, have we not sacrificed enough?

He had been prepared to—once he started hearing himself—to persuade her. But she hadn’t taken any. His savior, his commander, his honed force of a woman, as near a creature to Andraste as any living in this world. Had smiled at him. Had said—

Well, she’d said “Why not,” which would never make the gospels. And then, “I’m sure your Cleric Elthina could come up with some reasons, but I’ll leave those to her, hmm?” The teasing hum, flute-light. The shrug of her shoulders, narrow under the leather. For all the banked power, for all her heavy steps and the way every room she entered went quiet at the sound of them, Hawke was built small. Like her knives. “Come see me in the Hanged Man when you hear from her. No, better. The Rose. I’ll buy you a night. Call it a wedding gift.”

He’d watched her go, beneath the carving of the sun, a world unto herself. She’d said yes. And after he’d spoken to Elthina, who’d said yes—

_Are you so surprised,_ he’d asked _, that there’s faith in her?_ He’d told her all the while she’d come around. (Though he kept the name of Andraste out of his mouth for that afternoon. Prudence was a virtue, though her fierce face was newly alive in his heart.)

Hawke, not first, but best. The others would follow, those that had not already. Fenris’s branded fingers had lit candles here; the guardscaptain said a begrudging hello on Sundays. The rest would follow. Apostates and pirates or no.

The only way to lead was by example. Hawke knew that; he saw it in her uniquely.

_She is the most righteous woman I have ever met_ , he had said, and she had saved a city from conversion by the qunari sword, and though she looked as though she gave consent at that selfsame swordpoint, Elthina had said yes.

And he had waited by the altar, and Hawke in her turn had come.

She had worn her armor, leather still rust-brown in places. Freshly stained from the day. The smear of madder red she wore as a warlike warning across the bridge of her nose was as bright as if she’d just painted it on, as though he was the enemy she was primed to go toe to toe with even as she stood opposite him with a smile on. She smelled of sweat and of the streets. Had she told him it was righteous he would have bent his head and let her grind his face into the cobblestones, trusting he would come up the better for it. She did no such thing. Only grinned that sharp sliding grin and tilted her head.

“I’ve rings by the dozens,” she’d said, careless and light, and she’d brought up a purse from her belt, hefty and odd-angled from within. Damp and dark, he hoped only with sweat. So they weren’t living a life bathed in holy water yet. He couldn’t count on _that_ until Starkhaven was at peace. Until then, he had no righteousness but this: Hawke, full of cause, even holding a bag full of rings she’d pulled—he knew—off the fingers of corpses.

Elthina, thin-lipped, watched, as he put his hand over Hawke’s. His wife’s hand, now.

“I need no earthly possessions to affirm my devotion,” he said, and he swore by his faith that at that exact moment a sunbeam had come down through the window, blinding him for half a moment and affirming him. He had chosen well.

No better shield from temptation than this.

 

 

And so they are married.

 

_ “Present tense, now?”  _

_ “For now.”  _

_ “We can hope.”  
_

_ “Be careful what you wish for, Rivaini.”  _

_ “Why? She wasn't.”  _


	2. LEGACY

_“They were all right in the beginning, weren’t they?”_

_“Choirboy was all right. Hawke, no. Hawke was seething right from the start. You could see it in her—”_

_“Oh, you could see everything in her. I keep saying. A sin to let her go to waste.”_

_“She didn’t, did she? Go to waste, I mean. You took care of her, Rivaini. I heard her wedding night through the walls of the Hanged Man. You two never even made it all the way to the Rose.”_

_Isabela is several synonyms for disinclined to blush: bronzed and brazen. But her lips twist, now, and her eyes flick away. Not quite embarrassment. That’s one of the few things her inexhaustible repertoire is missing. Something else._

_Well, Varric can understand that._  

_“Here’s the best place to celebrate in town,” she says, her beat only just missed. She raises her tankard, lifts it high, chest rising with mighty emphasis. “Where else was she supposed to go? Not to Prince Righteous’s cot in the Chantry.”_

_“They should bronze you like that. Clear out those miserable slave statues and set you at the city gates instead to welcome travelers.”_  

_“They won’t even have to exaggerate my fabulous bosom.” She swigs lavishly, showily. “I was crafted by a generous hand.”_

_Nearest thing to religion that anyone’ll get from her: that Isabela was beautifully and wonderfully made. By whom, she doesn’t particularly care. What matters is that she is here, now._

_That makes two of them._

 

* * *

 

Not that Hawke had asked for a honeymoon, not that Sebastian had offered. For her, lost time. For him, luxury. Instead, attempted murder—her room this time, not his. Considering things, that bonded them closer than any wedding vow could have. That’s something they share unqualified: hard to lack faith in a blade aimed at your throat, an arrow aimed at your head.

The Carta thugs that come after Hawke got a lot more than they bargained for, but they left her with a flea in her ear named after her father: _the blood of the Hawke_. Like all fleabites, it itches something fierce, and she scratches it in her sleep. Carver comes to her, her father, her distant mother, her more-distant sister. A litany of Hawkes, wondering.

She doesn’t discuss them. The dreams, that is. Nor does she tell anyone where she’s going when she goes to unpack them to the one confessor she might mind. No Chantry involved. No confessing brothers, either.

 

_“Maker, even now—”_

_“Especially now.”_

_“Did you ever hear her calling herself—”_

_“Marian Vael? I never so much as heard him call her Marian.”_

_“Tastes all funny, doesn’t it?”_

_“Why do you think I’m washing my mouth out?”_

 

No, the itch brings her back into the Circle, for a very particular brand of healing. Of course—

 

_“Typical Hawke timing.”_

_“Typical.”_

 

She arrives just in time to fight off more Carta, slipping into her sister’s room with blades bared. By night. Which is the first thing Bethany says to her, sleep still thick in her throat but eyes always so clear:

“Why did you come here by night? Why did you come here in secret? Why couldn’t you come through the front door?”

 

 

She should have been the one to die, she knows that. Carver would have been adventuring with her sister—their sister—all this time. Out in the open air, whether or not it stinks. He would’ve complained of the stinking, but he would have made some use of his time here.

To be bitter—even to want, to want more than she has—would be ridiculous. She has no business being in the thick of battle when simply her being there means the templars might slip in behind them and draw their swords. Enemies in the front, for her sister’s always had a knack for picking up enemies, usually the ones she’ll look best defeating, and the Templar Order behind. Every war is harder on two sides.

There are no sides in the Gallows; everything in the Circle is built round and cornerless. The walls are slick even in the deepest middle, the furthest away from the sea air, and her bedroom is nearer rather than far. When she hears the immediate clink of swords, the whisper of an unsheathed knife and _the blood of the Hawke_ , her hand grabs at the wall but slides right off. There is nothing to hold onto here.

Still, despite her sister’s dashing entry, she gets a hold on her staff and is acquitting herself just fine. Her sister can dash, but she can blaze. And she would have let the assassins leave, smoky-bottomed, after answering a fair few questions, but, again: Marian Hawke’s timing is unrivalled. Ever ready to strike a pose, to turn the room.

She steps over a stack of dwarf thugs on her way to sit, with such casual ease, on her sister’s bed. As though she’d never left. “Hello,” she says. “Miss me?”

“I got your letters,” Bethany says, uneasy. “Is there something you couldn’t tell me there?”

“It looks like it got ahead of me. Came to you. Did they say anything strange?” Hawke flicks an up-and-down look over Bethany’s face, gets the information she came for in the space of a second. “Of course they did. Assassins never speak like normal people, and failed assassins tend to not even get any good lines in before the knife goes through them.”

“He said—the blood of the Hawke. You?”

“Or he’s sacrificing birds. Yes, say me. Though why not you?

Bethany raises her hands. Thinks: You know better. “I’m just a mage,” she says. “My blood’s not special. Not in any good way.”

“It’s the same blood.” Marian reaches out, takes her hand. “Just as warm, just as red. What other earthly good’s it?”

“I don’t know.”

Marian squeezes. “We’re going to find out. I’ll get you out.”

At that moment, Bethany burns any cold bitter wet Gallows rot out of her heart. Her sister’s here and she means it, she hasn’t been staying away, she hasn’t forgotten. She was always meant to come. At the right time. Unerring, heroic timing.

“Are you _sure_ you got my letters?” Marian asks. “All of them?”

“I think so,” Bethany says, “didn’t you get mine?” and Marian drops her hand.

“Of course. Get ready for fresh air. I’m taking you away from the ocean.”

Bethany brightens, her sister’s curtness regardless. Her sister’s always been short and sharp and often wounding. What’s it matter? She’s just survived an assassination attempt, and maybe soon she’ll get to live a bit.

 

 

The Hawke-Vael marriage carriage— _oh, must you?_ —leaves Kirkwall together, for Sebastian—who, of course, knows what it’s like to be sought after in your bed with a knife—won’t let his saviour-wife out of his sight. _A handsome dwarf with hair as gold as his heart and his purse escorts the beautiful young Hawke sister to the city gates, of course._

Sebastian is standing in the sunlight. _Maker take him, why does Choirboy always have to stand directly in the glare of the sun? Is he trying to ruin his friends’ aim every time he enters battle?_

Bethany looks at the two of them. “Oh,” she says.

“I suppose seeing it is better than reading about it,” Hawke says, leaning on _reading_ , and Bethany chastens visibly, as has always come easily to her.

“My lady,” says Sebastian, and takes Bethany’s hand. Kisses it, too. He never could get the hand of leaving court. Not even from deep in the bosom of the Chantry. The blood moves all the way through Sunshine—

 

_“All the way?”_

_“I was going to say, throat to cheeks.”_

_“Which cheeks?”_

 

Bethany, fresh air new on her cheeks, looking every inch the repotted flower— _even as we’re trudging through the Vimmark wastes_ —blushes like nobody has ever seen her. Like her skin is new, and unused to the sun. Which it might well have been, cooped up in the Gallows like that.

“I did get the letter,” she says. “You’re married. I’m sorry I didn’t say anything, I—I took it for a joke I didn’t get.”

“I hope I’m not too comic a figure,” says Sebastian, and she shakes her head very slowly, that soft black hair tumbling around her cheeks. Tucks it back with those elegant narrow fingers. A mage’s fingers, though that can hardly have been what he was thinking when he watched them move.

“No,” she said. “No.”

“Come along,” says Hawke, “let the poor girl catch her breath. She’s so tongue-tied, she hasn’t been out in the world a dog’s age. Not yours,” she says, dropping to scratch her mabari behind the ears, “not yours, of course not yours, you’ll live forever! You’ll outlive us all. Come on, boy.”

Her directive is unmistakably for dog and dog alone: there is no other plausible _boy_ in the party. Hero and mabari lead them on through the red wastes, to fight a god. _Even led me, that was showing them where they were going._

There should have been time for nothing more than that. And Hawke should have sent her sunshine sister back to the Gallows with nothing on her mind weighing heavier than another enemy defeated, than new knowledge of their father. When she hugged her sister, she should have meant it.

That’s not fair. She meant it just fine.

But Bethany, beautiful in the new landscape, radiant in any landscape that is not the Gallows, lopes after them and murmurs, “So, Sebastian, you’re a prince—”

Small wonder she thought it was a joke. And a cruel one at that. Marian Hawke never cared for princes one way or another, not their handsomeness nor their storied heroics nor their promise of courting and courts. That was Bethany’s favorite. Bethany, whom their father and Carver had both called _princess_ , though in very different voices.

Everyone that called Bethany Hawke a princess is dead, now. She is Marian Hawke’s sister, or _mage_ to those that do not recognize her. But, as of that, day, she was given something new: _lady_ , in a soft Starkhaven burr.

“My sister gets that,” she said to that, fumbling, “not me,” and Marian Hawke calls over her shoulder, “He doesn’t call me that!”

No. He calls her Hawke. _Same as the rest of us._ Bethany was the sole outlier, there—unique in what she called her sister and unique, now, in how she wore the Hawke name. Like silk, that day. Fine, slipping, Starkhaven-market silk.

“The Maker blessed my union with your sister,” Sebastian tells his ladyship. “Together, we stand pure in His light.”

A wrinkle impresses itself between Bethany’s brows. “You’re certain you’ve married my sister?”

“Dearest sister,” says Marian Hawke, whom nobody will ever call Marian Vael, “if you don’t shut your rosebud mouth, the monsters will come calling and they’ll eat you first.”

 

 

 

Her sister hugs her goodbye. “Chaste?” she asks, and Marian says “Yes”, low in her throat as her mabari’s growl.

Bethany says nothing to that. Nothing at all, save, after a breath:

“Are you happy?” she asks, and let no one say she did not mean it.

Marian shrugs, casts her way out of the hug. “Pleased as punch. You may have had something all these years. The handsome prince tale turns out to have hidden depths, and I can’t wait to plumb them thoroughly. If you’ll forgive my rudeness.”

Forgiveness is something Bethany has learned by imposition over the years. If she hadn’t, she would have been crushed under the weight of the world by now, under its sheer unfairness. Even so, she does not forget. She thinks, takes in, and keeps her thoughts to herself. Whatever’s in her head doesn’t show on her face. Only another blush that makes her sister laugh up and down. And that’s a kindness, too.

When her sister laughs, Bethany smiles, and she means that too. She wants her to be happy. Wants that for both of them.

With a fleeting dash of guilt, her sister asks “Are _you?_ ” and Bethany nods, takes her turn at laughter, gentler with it.

“Nothing has changed since I wrote you,” she says, which is the perfect truth. She has never lied to her sister’s face. Not to any of her family’s. Whether or not she offers up her heart on a plate for them to pick over at family dinner is quite another matter.

They are their father’s daughters, they embrace and his ghost whispers out of the room. Then Marian Hawke leaves for Kirkwall and Bethany for just outside of it, for looking in.


	3. TEMPTATION

_Isabela lifts an accusing fingertip. “You write a terrible romance, Varric. What about the chaste husband, the princely priest, the priestly prince? I know what my petal Bethany thought of him. She wrote me the most beautifully restrained letter and I could feel her absolutely fluttering on the wrong side of the page. Sent her a copy of_ Maker, Forgive Me! _at once, but what about him?”_

_“I hate the idea of writing Choirboy,” Varric snorts. “Everything feels like plagiarism. If there’s anything between his ears that Andraste didn’t say first, it’s news to me.”_

_“I’m not asking about his_ ears _.”_

 

* * *

 

“Darling,” Hawke purrs mockingly over a simple meal in the Chantry. She rarely accompanies him to his dinners there, given they plainly think spice is a sin, but after they blast through Corypheus’s chamber, she thinks she’d like a bath and a meal that tastes like a fast. Get the taint of Tevinter off her skin and purify her right up.

A servant draws the bath, because her husband will never learn. But Sebastian looks at her with such simple joy when he sits down opposite that she nearly forgives him. He’s always glad to have her here.

“It’s a pleasure to have you with me,” he says. “Later, will you light the evening prayers by my side?”

“Any side you like. Left, right, top, bottom.”

“Now, love.” He takes her hand, a gentle reprimand. His touch is warm and without sensuality. He is glad to have her here. Would he could be so glad to _have_ her. “Will you speak the Chant with me here? Andraste’s Grace—”

“You could say grace over me. Eat a whole second meal here on the table. And, no? Even now?” Hawke crosses her arms. He’s free to take his hand back. To take anything he likes.

“You know better.” His stare, eternally blue, is eternally baffled, eternally askance. She used to see more doubt in him, she thinks, but then she was stupid enough to give him the gift of certainty. Stupid, stupid. “You stood at my side. We spoke Her words with one voice. Your words sounded so lovely wrapped up with mine,” he says, and she feels a shudder of thwarted desire run itself over her skin, tangible and specific as a finger’s path—he was a seducer, wasn’t he, has giving that up to be a confessor allowed him to stop listening to his own words? There’s no trick on his face, no buried passion. Clarity, which is worse. Unbearable clarity of purpose; perfection. “I’ve rarely felt such true blessing as with you at my side.”

His belief is a burden, bright enough to blind him to his own desires. His belief in _her_ , as much as in Andraste. Hawke cringes, feeling her teeth click together in her mouth. This is her doing. So it is. She made her bed and shouldn’t have made it in the Chantry.

Nevertheless. It helps her to have the Chantry door open to her, to have Elthina perfunctorily at her side. If the people of Kirkwall listen to her, come to her for guidance, as she can’t seem to stop them doing, then she’ll need that. She’ll come and go and he’ll come around. Her husband, not even in name. Only in the Maker’s will, and she comes and goes as to how greatly that concerns her.

“Think on it,” she says. “Anyhow, no, I don’t think I’ll be profaning the altar with my presence tonight. You know where I’ll be.”

He can come to her, if he likes, if he _needs_. Meantime, she prefers her graces wicked, anyhow.

 

 

It occurs to Sebastian Vael, someday Prince of Starkhaven, current Brother of the Eternal Flame, blessed in Her favor, that he has never taken his charitable works to the Gallows. Surely they can need aid nowhere more acutely than there, in that dark pillar of the building that seems to stare Kirkwall down, a baleful reminder of sins the city has only partly confessed. Mages need a firm hand, of course, his own Andraste taught him this, but it strikes him as a grave danger to leave them locked in hopeless stone, surrounded by ghosts. He knows ghosts. And mages need light as much as anyone, need confessing more, need Her flame more than most. All the moreso because they can create their own.

The young Lady Hawke, he envisions, with fire caught between her hands.

Elthina falters when he requests this, speaks to him with the slow precision that marks doubts behind her words without her having to speak them aloud. But doubt is a sin, and he can pull her around. She thinks he’s doing it for impure reasons. For Hawke and her apostates. They’ll come around or they’ll be brought around, but they’re not why. They have not bent his ear. That, he can assure her.

“I do it for the good,” he says, “not for the wicked,” and at last Elthina flicks her hand into a gesture of blessing and lets him go.

All Circles are Chantry business, and the prison unlocks for him when he gets off the boat, his armor twice-whitened in the salt air. A brief discussion of bureaucratic values with the First Enchanter, whose wheedling voice creeps under his skin just where the dank harbor air has already rendered vulnerable to rot and irritation, but a servant of Andraste can’t be picky about where he chooses to bestow his blessing, nor on whom. Then at last access to the temple.

The temple of the Gallows is very quiet indeed. Only one body stands by the altar, her fingers hovering above one unlit wick. He watches as the flame blooms softly to light, willed to it. Delicate fingers, a tall woman and well made, her hair dark and shining in the halo of light—the candle-glow mixing in with her natural radiance. The air warps softly around her, a true-mage feature, a mark of power. One he had found universally unnerving before he had stood beside this one. Even while she cast.

Bethany Hawke saved him and her sister from Corypheus at least once, had the opportunity to be saved by them as well. They’d fought well together. He fears her not at all, and knows her goodness. Her piety, she had not mentioned overtly, but her sister’s lewd remarks had brought such bright color to her cheek he’d made certain assumptions. About her behavior, that is, and her faith, only good things, and h e’s glad to see his thoughts were right. The sight of her lifts his heart, here. He feels the kind of true and perfect joy he can only ever find in a temple and is struck by how neatly she fits into the image that anchors his devotions.

For this reason, he does not call out to her. Both in that he does not wish to interrupt her contemplation and, Andraste save him, he can’t help luxuriating in the sight of her like this. The bent head, the candlelight on her skin, the penitent twist of her hands, the belief radiating off her equal to her magic.

His armor is, for its artistry, light, an archer’s armor with no foot-covering, and his steps are quiet, as they must be for walking through his own Chantry without disturbing its peace. When he makes his way to her side, her eyes are still lowered. The altar’s flames light the shadows of her lashes, pull them long and fluttering over the curve of her cheeks.

“Lady Hawke,” he says, and a shock jolts through her whole body. Her hands fly apart, out of their prayer, in them the threat of flame and tempest, but she does not cast. She has better control than that. He’s seen as much.

“Sebastian,” she says, shock catching her breath. “What are you doing here?”

“I think of myself as a doer of good works, but spending a little time in your charmed company made me realize I’d forgotten the Gallows altogether.”

She exhales the breath she’s been holding, a short puff of disdain. “Would we all could.”

“I wouldn’t forget you.”

“But how did you get in?” she asks. “Even my sister, with all of Kirkwall licking her toes, can’t seem to get through the Gallows gates.”

“What do you mean? She’s here far more often than she likes.”

The light, candle-bright, goes out of her eyes.

“Is she,” she says, and her voice is flat as a Tranquil’s.

He doesn’t know what he’s said. She has—has travelled from the First Enchanter to the Knight-Commander time and again, has accumulated more seals and special dispensations than she can carry at once. Certainly, she hates the place, but that doesn’t keep her from obliging. “Not happily,” he begins, and Bethany turns, picking up the candle once more. The goldwork on the shoulders of her robes squares off against the world.

“No. She wouldn’t want to mix business and pleasure, would she? It’s not like she’s paid to drink and kill with her friends, not like she’s fêted for doing exactly as she pleases. Not as though she’d want to bring her little sister back into the picture.”

“She hasn’t seen you,” he says, understanding.

“She most certainly has not.”

The air between them is thick and terrible with things unsaid, letters unopened, sickness and weakness left untended for its invisibility—what ailments are here run deep in the blood. He cannot speak for his wife. Not to her own sister. Not for the world.

With a little sigh, Bethany Hawke closes her face as neatly as a box, locks it away, and touches the flame of the candle to the next. Lighting them manually, he notices. Everything she does speaks of restraint, restraint against her own will. He will not tell her to do otherwise—it makes her a good Andrastian, this willingness to keep her power in her pocket, to force her hands into work. It took him years to cleanse the idleness from his flesh, never mind his spirit. He can learn from her, with her. “Let me help you,” he says, reaching out, as she turns with the candle in her hand.

These things happen at once: his hand on her wrist, the satin warmth of that wrist, the high shocked catch of breath in her mouth, the sudden blaze of flame into every candlewick in the room. For a moment, her face is burnt a seraphic gold in the reflected light, and her expression in the centre of it is nakedly horrified, horrifiedly naked.

Then pain searing onto his hand. White, hot, liquid—and gone.

“Oh,” Bethany is gasping, “oh, Maker, forgive me, you’re burnt.”

“It’s nothing,” he says. A drop of wax marks the back of his hand, no bigger than a copper coin. How strange that something so small can concentrate the senses so. Cool, now, and strangely tight over his skin, and he swears the rest of his skin echoes that strange tightness, that strange prickling awareness, beneath his armor. “No hurt at all.”

“No,” she says, and something like a smile ghosts about her lips. Her thoughts are still locked, her soul still firmly private, but the look in her eyes is brighter now, clever in its private way. Her thumb works its way into the cooling wax trail on the candle’s side. “I’ve done that to myself before. It’s not so bad. But it’s different when I’m doing something stupid to myself.”

She meets his eyes, and another Sebastian Vael, a years-dead Sebastian Vael, has a sudden, violently clear vision.

Wax, he sees, wax on bare skin, wax on _her_ bare skin, that same keen intake of breath on her lips, the candle in his hands this time. Her kindling the flame without looking, offering t he bare expanse of her back, or her wrists turned up, waiting, rosy. Heat, skin, _hers_ , and his own near-prophetic sense of what the scene might look like, his old self’s genius of sin.

He takes a lurching step back. Not quick enough.

That self, that he has not been for years says, _Clever_.

_Thought for a minute you forgot how to touch a woman,_  it says, _you acting the ox at the altar like that. But it’d seem you’ve only grown slyer over the years._

His fingers itch, wanting to touch hers, to guide her hand. Wanting, with sudden clarity, her fingertips on the scorched spot, stroking the agony back into sweetness. He takes another step. Away. “Thank you for your patience,” he says, clearing his throat, “and your charity. I have interrupted your prayers with nothing but clumsiness.”

“I’ve prayers to spare,” she says lightly, “and time,” hurrying to return the candle to its home among its blazing friends. The room is hot and flame-lit, flame-lurid around them. He tries not to think of their startled origin, the gasp in Bethany Hawke’s mouth. Antiquated wisdom whispering in the back of his mind all the while: _You’ve heard a woman make that sound before._

Andraste, forgive me, he thinks. A moment of such unspeakable weakness in the light of Your own flame.

“Are you truly coming back to do good works here in the Gallows, then?” she asks. Her head is bent, hands steady on the altar, all of her carefully not looking back, but he can hear the searing rise of hope in her voice. Another candle in a too-bright room.

He owes his duty to the Chantry, his charity to the most neglected places he can find, and only his best and purest thoughts to Bethany Hawke. He will wash away his own residual filth, starting in this room.

“Of course,” he says. “Of course I am.”


	4. DESIRE

_The candle on the table is low. Isabela purses her lips and blows toward it, making the flame flicker, casting the shadows in a new and provocative light. “If I’d’ve known what went on in Chantry services—”_

_“Don’t get your hopes up, Rivaini. He didn’t make a convert of every Hawke.”_

_Isabela’s eyes shine amber through the dimming light. There is more wax on the table than not. The night is growing long and Hawke still hasn’t come. Behind them, two young men lean in, maybe listening. Maybe just watching the play of light. Isabela sits with a bare leg slung idly over her chair, shadows concealing and teasing beneath the flutter of white cloth between her legs. Not a picture Varric himself would have chosen to paint, with words or wax or pictures, but then again, it’s not for his benefit._

_They all want to be cast in bronze—or in wax etch, or in wordsmithing—to their best advantage. He hopes the light is being kind to him as well._

_Hour after hour and Hawke still hasn’t come. Hour after hour and the absence gains new and ugly weight._

_“Andraste of the famously conjured tits has a sense of humor,” says Isabela, watching herself being watched, not yet smiling about it. “Or is it the Maker who shuffles His people like a deck for Wicked Grace? I can never remember who does what.” She shrugs ostentatiously, a perfect heathen, and Varric hears a choral sigh behind him. Choirboy harmonics all around, will they never be free from it? Go home, boys, he thinks, you’re outclassed._

_But they do no harm. They’ll never get close enough. Her eyes are on the door behind him. He’s lucky enough to not have the looking-out view. (Doesn’t need it. He’d know her step. He’s been listening despite himself, despite his faith—hey, there’s the question of faith, he and Rivaini share more of a sense of humor than expected.)_

_She says, “Whoever’s in charge of whatever, everyone who gets dragged backwards through the Fade comes out thinking they’re a right bit funnier than they are.”_

_The joke, he knows, is the same: it’s whatever you want most._

 

* * *

 

The tendency of demons to flock to demons was exactly what made Kirkwall the charming tourist destination it was, so when Flora Harriman wrote a letter saying her house was full again with uninvited guests Marian wasn’t exactly surprised. Surprised somewhat that the letter came to her house, and not the Chantry, but maybe Flora’d heard the happy news—or maybe not, maybe this was more Champion business. What a right joy. Though she hadn’t denied it was something of a relief to do small things after the great near-war that had crowned her Champion. Be grateful when it was just demons to be killed, not people. _Come along, husband,_ she’d had to say, _back into the belly of the beast_.

Well, she hadn’t had to say _husband_ , but if she rung the bell loud enough in his ear perhaps he’d listen and remember the meaning of the word.

He took it better than expected, though. Eyes soft rather than hard. Not a cloud in that particular summertime sky, even when they arrive at the threshold of the haunted Harrimans’ haunted estate.

“You’ve done so much for me,” he says, his hand brief and warm on hers. That swell of frustration in her, longing wound tight as thread in and around it, familiar as breathing at his side. How in the Maker’s name did she get herself into this? She can ask herself that in so many voices now—Isabela’s, laughing and breath-soft in her ear; Anders’s, well, not laughing, standing tall and terribly near her, near enough for her to breathe his questions in. In the hopes they’d sober her up, maybe. But there’s no law saying she’s got to talk to her friends about all her other friends. Even having stumbled into ringed and holy matrimony with one of them.

She clicks her tongue at him, kicks him light in the shin. Bow at his back, daggers in her hands, this is how they are at their best. It has been too long since he’s seen her as _her_ —and since she’s seen the version of him that first flashed so brilliant and enticing in her eye, the quick shot, the anger.

He’s calmed since. That’s a good thing, she thinks, right. Good for the pair of them. Something something praise the Light. Meanwhile, there’s a scuffling sound in the shadows and she takes off at a run: the manor is, this time, guaranteeably empty, Flora at some estate making new friends in Hightown and more importantly making herself scarce while the ratcatcher comes and does her dirty work for her. Ah, well, anything for a friend and a coin.

The air is easier to breathe this time. There are fewer echoes, fewer lesser spirits to get in the way. Marian moves fast and loose and lets herself. Throws a dagger at the odd shadow just to see it stick in, grins over her shoulder just to see him keeping cover. “Been a bit,” she says, “hasn’t it?”

“You’re not rusty.”

Her laugh rings out in the empty hall. “No. Thought you might be, though! You’re always dodging demonic infestations.”

“The Fade is no place for a good man,” he says, stern at her back, and she nettles— _what’s she, then?_ If she can’t be good, at least she can be good at her _job._  “A man of faith,” he amends, then, not unwisely, if not quite bravely.  “But they’ve no business in _our_ world, and I won’t let my grandfather’s bow grow stiff past use.”

She glances back with a raised brow. Really, she thinks, not for the first time, he ought go into the Fade more than anyone. Confront his dreams firsthand rather than keeping them locked away. Surely there’s nothing to fear from him losing control, she thinks; she’s right _here,_ after all, to render them real.

“Keep that worry alive. Surely you’re not more attentive to your bow than to yourself.”

“ _Hawke_.”

“What? Me?”

“You’re _not_ yourself,” he says, though of course she is only ever and exactly herself, now more than ever, but she knows what he means. Demons always offering him a convenient moral out, sin and lyrium thickening like fog around them and turning the cobwebs violet. The signature of desire, of course it’s desire, it was always desire, demons attract demons and like attracts like—like a second posh perfume for the ruined fancy halls, smoky-rosy in her nose and mouth. Desire, corrupt cousin of purpose, more supple secondary to rage. Shorter than pride, for a mercy. Of the demonic signatures, it’s the one she grapples with the most easily.

It’s good to have balancing skill-sets, she thinks, ducking into the master bedroom and seeing the shape in bed. “Hi,” she says. “You’re late to the party.”

The creature, violet-skinned, dressed like something out of a romance novel’s romance novel ( _advertising, dwarf?_ ), rolls over, a sensual disturbance in the sheets. “I’m right on time,” says the harpstring voice, a thrum in Marian’s bones. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

All right, thinks Marian, do your worst. She relaxes into her own defiant angry wanting, knives out. What she wants right now is simple: demon blood on the floor, the satisfaction of a job well done (in a city where things are less and less simple, where jobs come at greater and greater cost). What she wants, more than that, is, yes, predictable: come on, demon, shift your skin and make fun of her for wanting Sebastian to pull her off into the shadows, to kiss the too-sweet smudges of violet-charred blood off her lips after the inevitable killing. That very bed where the demon lies now. Marian tap-tap-taps her toe, thinking of what to do. Wrists balanced, waiting for the strike.

The demon blinks its eyes—golden eyes. The horns twisting from her temples blacken and silken, twining down into hanks of hair. It, now _she_ , shakes her head. She is naked, then, skin paling and softening, all of her suddenly recognizable.

Marian feels the blood drain from her face as the demon, wearing an expression she knows, looks up. A kittenish, goading expression on that heart-shaped brand-new ever-familiar face.

Do your worst, she’d thought, she should never have thought; now she’s thinking, _they know what you want_ and what a complicated thing it is, wanting, how all she wants is, yes, Bethany out of the Circle, Bethany to never have _been_ in the Circle, Bethany to never have needed it at all, Bethany here not there and somewhere where the sight of her wouldn’t make Marian’s flesh want to crawl off her body. As it is, in the Circle, she’d just as soon never see her again.

Desire knows.

“Sebastian,” she says, voice cold as the floor under her feet. Let the arrow fly again, swift and true, same as last time. (Let her not be to blame. Oh, Andraste, let it not be her fault.) Please don’t make her do this by her own hand, she thinks, oh, please spare her this. “If you’d do the honors?”

All this time, and the demon hasn’t once looked her in the eye. It isn’t looking at her now.

“You won’t take what you want in Starkhaven,” it says, she says, _Bethany’s lips_ say. “And you can’t take what you want here in Kirkwall, Sebastian Vael, who is never at home with his desires. What’s it going to be?”

Sebastian’s knuckles are white on the bow but the arrow stays fixed in place.

He isn’t moving.

The demon shifts in the bed, the sheet falling and baring breasts that still bear the violet demon-flesh tinge under the rose-and-cream of— _Maker_ don’t make her look at her sister like this, even with the skin borrowed, _Maker_ don’t make her watch the demon watch Sebastian like this, don’t make her turn back, don’t make her read the map of his desire on his face.

No, she thinks. Absolutely not.

So, closing her heart and closing her eyes and closing her wicked racing thoughts while her hand’s on the blade, she tells herself what to do. Just her, alone, but she’s done worse, surely, she’ll be _fine_ —

She does what she must. As ever, her aim is true.

Her left dagger cuts through her sister’s throat, and it would be a lie if she said she didn’t suck in a breath and say the quickest prayer she could. Then the demon bleeds violet and black all over Harriman sheets and she exhales mightily. Never her sister at all.

She does the only thing she can, the one thing she’s good at: pulls her dagger out of the creature’s throat and thanks the Maker and, sure, why not, Andraste too, that they don’t keep their transfigurations once they’re dead.

The desire demon never once turned its gaze to her.

Wiping demon blood off on her trouser leg, she says, and her voice stays cold, “Explain that.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

She whips around; his eyes are clear blue once more, face smooth. “What do you—“ She almost laughs. Give her a reason. “What just came out of its mouth. Or didn’t you see what I saw?”

A flicker, like a candle in a windy room. “Why,” he asks, “what did you see?”

“My sister,” she growls, disbelieving, “you _ass_.”

He blinks. Clear blue. After a moment of silence, marked by the sound of knife strafing over leather, he takes a hesitant step her way.

“A desire demon is an uncanny thing,” he says, and his voice is a slow clear educator’s tone. “Closer kin to envy than you’d think—”

“Don’t proselytize at me,” she snarls, “not now! You think I’m envious of my sister, locked in that stone prison, breathing in nothing but sea-rot for the crime of my father’s blood? I didn’t bring my sister into the room, and the demon wasn’t batting my sister’s lashes at _me_.”

“Envy,” he says, very quiet, sure as dogma. “Demons wish to set us at each other, that we might not fight them effectively together. Of course it was for you, Hawke. They always see you first.”

She hates her unsurety, how she wavers, covered in blood. Hates the smoothness of his face and the distance of his body, in sleek white metal. Untouched by an ounce of the filthy stuff. “Well,” she bites out, “this one did a damn good job. I might as well have been fighting alone.”

She stalks out of the room, shivering, with him just a step behind. Not a note of falsehood in his features. Fade take him, she thinks. Take him and shake him.

He might be right. But she doesn’t want to think about his dreams.

 

 

_What an inveterate liar. I almost like him for it._

_You always liked him._

_I almost want him for it. If I’d had him first, it would’ve saved us a host of trouble._

_Would that you could’ve shifted your heart._

_I? I have no heart, dwarf, you know that._

_Milady Rivaini, we both know better. A heart as inconstant as the sea, but as vast, too._

_Now, now. If I’m going in one of your books you’ll have to do better than that… Though, I’ll admit, it’s not bad for a start._

 

 

That night Sebastian Vael makes several accounts of himself—

_Andraste keep me from my sins._

_Andraste keep me from the manipulations of demons and the lies of the flesh._

_Andraste I put my heart upon Your pyre_.

Sleepless, the world burns, and Bethany Hawke’s pure flesh writhes between borrowed sheets; he carries the visions into waking, wretched with them, flesh afire and yet no nearer his savior for it. (How dare the demon and how dare _he_ , he thinks fragmentedly; how dare anything warp into sin the will, the _body_ , of a girl like that. A girl like, what, he can’t think like what. Can’t get close enough to put words on it.)

The sound of her voice on the Chant and the gasp on her lips when the wax fell—these memories he offers to the pyre, to be burnt clean, to be taken from him and unsullied. Her head bent, her hair falling, the fire of the candles flaring out from her slim fingertips— _take it, take it all_. May he forget every detail and may she be saved from his misremembering. No demon will touch her if he puts out his eyes.

Sunrise comes knocking painfully at his door, like a visitor. All right, he thinks, shambling stiffly—all-over stiffly—to his feet, it _is_ a knock, there _is_ someone waiting. Waiting to make account. He must not hope for Andraste Herself.

Maker praise, it is not Elthina, that he hopes may never see him in such despair.

“You look a fright,” says Hawke.

Here she is, and he exhales: his wife before Andraste and partner in chaste obedience. The nearest thing.

He rests his eyes on her, feels sure on his feet—“Are you all right?” she asks, wary-eyed, walls up, untouchable, _Maker bless her_ she remains untouchable—and makes up his mind.

“I am sorry,” he says, kneeling. He takes her hands in his, bows his head against her waist, the posture of supplication already stitching him back together somewhat. Through the thick cloth of her trousers he can feel the sharp bone of her hip and the dense muscle of her thigh and the stiffness under all of it, the shock. “I failed you in the fight, when I owe you more than I can say. You are the nearest thing to Andraste Herself I’ve ever seen walk the earth.”

“Good grief,” she says with a startled laugh, “get up, I didn’t come here to speak the Chant with you. Just didn’t want the night to get in the way. It ended uglier and I didn’t care to leave it there.”

She smells like the Hanged Man, like the night’s fight, smoke and blood and ale and sweat of all kinds beneath her trousers. When she helps him to his feet he sees a smudge of kohl and gold on her cheek. Listens to her purse ring, fat with new gold. She owes him nothing, and he her everything. He lays a hand on her shoulder, over her vest and blouse, in benediction.

“If you wouldn’t mind a vacation from darling Elthina’s house,” she says with a slight smirk, “what’s say you and I get out of the City of Chains for a time? Turns out bondage doesn’t begin and end at city limits.”

“You are much in demand,” he says, and she sighs, eyes rolling up toward the ceiling. Andraste watches there, calm in her agony. Hawke turns her gaze quickly away.

“It’s a family invitation to some Orlesian’s party home near the mountains,” she says, “and I’d skip out wholesale but Varric’s got some black-market contact angling to meet there and when I said I might take the invitation it made my mother so _happy_ —” She looks away, restless, her family ties too tight. (He doesn’t think of what they tie her to. Doesn’t think beyond the room.) “Gamlen won’t have _her_ gallivanting off to the hoity-toity highlands, not alone, so I can’t hear the end of it. _Marian, put on a dress,_ meanwhile Varric’s got one of his contacts sniffing the air around the estate and trying to duck in. Steal this, listen in on that, makes no mind to me if I can placate him and Mother and my purse all in one. So, Prince of Starkhaven—” _Ah_ , he raises a finger and the indication of a protest, but she waves it off and for now, owing her a better version of himself, he lets her. “Think you’d be willing to be my escort?”

He says, “I think I’d be willing to take you anywhere.”

“That’s why I keep you around,” she says, smiling, standing tall to press her lips to his cheek. Chastely, though he burns with it. More shame, bringing him ever nearer to Andraste in his flesh and ever farther in his soul.


	5. MASKING

_Isabela grins, suddenly, by candlelight. “You botched that one, dwarf.”_

_“What, our visit to Chateau Haine?” Varric frowns, mock-affronted. He doesn’t think he’d know what true affront would look like on him: as usual, pantomime comes easier. “I seem to recall a very pleasant evening, fine gowns, fine wine, ham that tasted like—what was it, sorrow?”_

_“Pig flesh,” says Isabela, with the shipworn disdain of a woman who’s lived off maggot-laced biscuits and lived to like the trial. He commends her. Under the reams of soft flesh she puts on such opulent display, she’s harder than any of them. Or, in any case, the most durable. What that durability protects—well, it’s not his to touch, even if, as a storyteller, he does consider it._

_The hardest in truth, as always, their beloved hobnail Marian. Their chimera, whom he’d coaxed into fancy dress for purposes of spying. For once, she’d taken to the task. How well she looked in a fine hat, new leather trousers with no bloodstains at all, a vest she’d even bought. Lace at the throat, cravat and collar and cuffs to match. Scars well and truly hidden. Never quite willing to do Mother proud—ah, dwarf, that’s cruel even for dramatic effect. He regrets the thought at once._

_To the moment. Of course, she’d unavoidably brought the husband, the church vows and corpse rings. By then, she had a point to prove. She never took well to having her points dulled._

_They wait for her now, knowing she sharpens as she waits. She has to come out sometime._

_Meantime, the night lengthens, the wax and spilt ale greases and greases the filthy table between them but Isabela’s smile, at last, lasts. He understands why, his nostalgia more or less in line with hers. They so rarely share the same memories, but this one had the whole troupe of them stomping into Duke Prosper’s halls, in varying patchworks of propriety. Fancy and unfancy dress alike: Merrill barefoot, Isabela’s figureheads firmly out, but Fenris had put on a fine coat with a collar that went up to his chin and even Blondie’s chicken-feathers fluffed up a bit. His part, he’d been thinking of the mission and watching that skinny elf—the other skinny elf, the other_ other _skinny elf, the one he wouldn’t miss when she was gone—every turn she took, but he’d still polished Bianca for the job, not that it ever takes much persuasion for him to handle his lady with care._

_He can think of few times they were truly_ all _together like that. And none of the ones that came after were half so pleasant._

_“You know,” says Isabela, reminiscing with all her teeth out, “before that bony Tallis bitch snatched her away and sent the rest of us chasing through the dungeons, she and I managed to duck into one of the guest bedrooms—”_

_“I do know. Rivaini, the whole court knew.”_

_“Good,” says Isabela. Her eyes close and he doesn’t begrudge her the memory. The last good one, maybe. Half a fortnight after she’d returned to Kirkwall, to find Marian washed in qunari blood._

_But that story’s been told ad nauseam. Now, to the cleanup, to the ball. He toasts. “To nights stolen.”_

_“Eat the rich or eat their food,” Isabela tosses back—rich indeed coming from the lover of the Viscountess of Kirkwall, the scion of the Amell line, the might-be Starkhaven princess._

_Maker, he hopes not._

_How much easier it was when they were thieves, rather than warriors, and nobility were only there to pay or be paid._ Starkhaven, _he thinks,_ this is your fault.

It always was.

 

* * *

 

Of course he wouldn’t have chosen to travel with everyone Marian’s ever met, but that’s his bride for you, always traveling in a pack. She wears her lace with the restlessness of a costumed wolf. The image in his head because Varric wouldn’t stop telling old tales— _did you know the Orlesian story of the witch and the wolves’ banquet?_ —in the carriage, the whole journey over and when he’d, very politely, asked if he might tell the next yarn, thinking he might spin it into scripture, he got laughter for his troubles.

His skin felt thin for weeks. His dreams have been troubled. He’d worried. After the demon, he’d worried—of course. But how reassuring to have her here as Marian Hawke, Lady Amell, bride of Starkhaven and Andraste alike, and how reassuring too that even now that he’d seen her in Orlesian lace and begrudging pearl his heart remained steady and sure. Her restoration was his purpose. Her survival—and the fact that that survival meant more than just constantly dodging blows dealt in dark alleys she insisted on barrelling into. Survival in all things. Of the soul. Of the social, too.

How wonderful to see her mocking grin disappearing behind the fan her mother had given her; even as he’d said _you’ll have to get used to all this someday, surely_ , how wonderful the knowledge that she was above the worldly cares.

_Nothing’s fun once you’re_ used _to it,_ Varric had reproached, and that mage—why she had to bring the mage, he’d never understand—had sat upright, ruffling angrily, said _she doesn’t_ have _to do anything,_ looked like he’d wanted to light Sebastian up and down with blue fire as he’d said _we’re all free,_ and at least Fenris had been there to give a snort and turn the mage’s head, willing as always to take his rage on as a game. A worldly good—a good fight was one of the many sporting pleasures Sebastian had consigned to his old life, his old self.

Now his wife was above social concern. He might not have been so above them alone.

As she turned her head to speak to Isabela—the Rivaini pirate’s lips on her ear, below the shorn edge of her hair—how wonderful to know that she was even above him. In this, he could anchor himself, his concerns.

Impossible to be troubled upon waking, to worry for his sanctity, with her as his guide. Even as she drank from Isabela’s flask and choked on a gulp of laughter and liquor—even as he’d remembered what he’d been, he bolstered himself calmly against the memory. Even in her faults, she improved him.

The carriage lurches to a stop outside the gates of the estate. “Lady Amell,” Marian Hawke sings through the window, voice hoarse and drawling, lightly wearing a mock-Orlesian accent—Isabela smothers her laughter into her hand, as Merrill giggles into Isabela’s shoulder. A row of reactions. They encourage her, always.

“We’ve already got a Lady Amell at the party.”

“What?” Marian drops the fan and the accent, yanking aside the curtain to stare at the guard. “Then you’ve got an impostor. It’s the Champion of Kirkwall, you shit.”

That does the trick—that, and a copy of her image printed humiliatingly crisp on a coin, a copy of Varric’s paperback doggerel that he persists in insisting was helpful—

_It was!_

—and they are through the gates at last. At last, carriage slowing, Marian takes another gulp and a giggle. “I swear if Mother’s here to get her invitation back I’ll kill her. I’ll run off with that Tallis right into the night and never be seen again.”

“If you leave us for Tallis, love,” says Isabela, disembarking with her arm around Marian’s waist before Sebastian can escort her down, “I will never forgive you.”

Yes, all right, they’re all a collected picture of earthly desires around him, but didn’t that make it all the more triumphant to resist them? He thanks Andraste and, as ever, the thanking reassures him. The soft chatter of the party floating on the air does its part to reassure him as well. It smacks of home, but not of home’s portentous significance: the whispers lull him but do not seek him out by name. When they speak of him, they say only this: _There’s the prince of Starkhaven on the Champion’s arm!_

As they pass through the gates into the vast gardens of Chateau Haine he looks idly over Marian’s head at the sea of faces. The shape of the yard, not quite like Starkhaven’s gardens, which always ran to mock-wildness and flowers of a deeper and thornier nature—yet with topiaries of equal ambition. One bush parts, crisply, thick with an unnaturally grafted entwining of pale roses and paler lily, to reveal, behind it, a hint of a figure and face. Just from the neck up. Curling black hair, shining and loose in the sun. Parted in the centre. A finger in a ringlet by the ear, tucking it back from a cheek so very like one of those roses.

“Vael,” Marian says, starting, her hand on his. “You’re bruising. Bruise for fun or loosen up.”

They are in company. Hers. He can’t be seen seeing things. Blinking, he nods to their host, who is all smiles. For a mercy, from an Orlesian, he’s foregone his mask.

“Dear Serah Hawke,” says Duke Prosper, “how honored we are. What a true rarity to have both young Ladies Amell taking up the mantle.”

“What?” she snaps, a wasp among the roses.

“Young Baron Ricard,” calls Prosper to whatever nobleman stood on the far side of the bushes, in uninterrupted speech with the lady standing opposite—the lordling has said something to make her laugh, to make her lips part and her throat tilt, and Sebastian feels the ground tilt horribly underfoot—“stop monopolizing my charming guest. Bring the lady here.”

He sees the laughter die in the lady’s mouth, sees her lips snap shut. Patiently escorted the long way round the wall of roses by this baron or baronet that looks all of fifteen, she trips over the hem of her robe when she gets to the other side. She wears her Circle robes even here. Of course she does. Circle mages don’t have holiday clothes. They don’t have a reason to leave the Circle.

The young baron hands her off, ungracefully and ungraciously. Then Bethany Hawke stands at Duke Prosper’s side, eyes on her toes.

But for a moment, Sebastian had seen her by the flowers, he had seen her in the light. When she’d thought herself unwatched and untethered. The only Lady Hawke on the grounds.

“Bethany,” says Marian coolly. “They let you out for special occasions?”

A hint of banked fire flashes in Bethany’s eyes. Momentarily. “ _Mother_ writes,” she says emphatically. “And Commander Orsino knows the value of a name.”

“I wouldn’t have supposed Commander Cullen knew the same. Did you know of this—?” Marian looks back at a puzzled Aveline behind her, then forward, then shrugs it off altogether. “Shan’t look between the teeth of a gift. It’s nice to see you out in the fresh air.”

She hugs her sister. It disentangles her arm from Sebastian’s. He tries not to consider the sudden absence at his side.

“Good to see you, Sunshine,” says Varric warmly, and she regains her footing. That makes one of them.

Everyone has something to say to Bethany Hawke, then: the dam breaks and she is greeted from top to toe, told she’s lovely and longed-for in this way and that. How pleased Merrill is! How delighted Isabela! Even severe Aveline has a strong hand to place on her shoulder, even the mage has a gentle word. Fenris says something about the robes—how lovely she’d look in a dress of the Orlesian fashion— _spare me_ , thinks a silent penitent, despairing. Drowned out by the rest of the chatter. Varric agrees, of course— _yes of course our Sunshine would be resplendent in a dress, but she’s got to give these Orlesians a chance_ —

Her smile, or _a_ smile, returns in its diffident fashion. Nothing near the one he’d caught unawares. But she’s not even offering him the pale and piecemeal version. Him, she does not look at. Not a flicked lash for Sebastian Vael.

_For a mercy_ , he thinks, and with it, _for the flame_.

A flicker of fire-orange catches his eye across the room, and he is saved by the flame indeed. This woman, with the hair, he recognizes: the Divine’s own agent.

He whispers in Marian’s ear and she makes a pained face. Her eyes cast to Anders—oh, yes, she always has to be so careful with her friends, and yet, never careful enough. Her friends the criminals and heretics. Every time he forgets, he’s reminded.

“Make yourselves inconspicuous,” she says, laughing at the impossibility, tapping her ear: _listen_. Shortly after she manages to get them to disperse, Isabela taking up Duke Prosper’s eye, Tallis leading an infuriating circuit around the food tables, Anders sulking off. Fenris has taken Bethany’s arm. A kindness, perhaps. Fenris is full of them, surprising ones. Sebastian does not watch them go. Eyes on the bird across the room. The Nightingale.

Marian Hawke, sweeping her fine hat from her head, leans up to whisper in his ear: “What’s this about?”

“She wanted to meet with me,” he says, low and cautious, “back in the Kirkwall Chantry. I don’t wish to call her attention in public, but—”

She snags a passing maid. “Here,” she says to her, “take the redhead a glass of sparkling and tell her it’s from the Champion of Kirkwall. You were saying?”

“That’d do it,” he supposes. He has to admire her, even as she does the exact opposite of his wishes at all times. But he always admires her.

He watches Sister Nightingale take the drink and look up.

She’s about his age and distantly pretty, eyes pale blue and perpetually gazing elsewhere. A face primed for divinity, though she sharpens as she stares and he remembers what it is, exactly, that she does. The Left Hand of the Divine, the one that holds the longest reach, the one that invariably holds the knife.

But she smiles as she steps toward them. “Lady Hawke,” she says. “I’ve heard the most enchanting stories. And the Prince of Starkhaven, cutting a royal figure even far from his throne.”

His breath sticks in his throat. “I’m not out to take the throne any time soon,” he says. “I am not so easily swayed from my vows.”

Surely the Chantry, of all places, has to understand. Surely they will commend him for his focus. The Left Hand is so pale and intent, so famously pious: surely she can see the faultlines in his heart, the cracks in his very soul.

Even straying this far from Kirkwall was a bad idea. Even at Marian Hawke’s side. The air is perfumed and dangerously intoxicating, and the breaths he takes, he does not deserve.

Sister Nightingale looks surprised. “You know Justinia is quite interested in your restoration,” she says, and Marian looks at him sharply.

“Is she?”

“How not?” continues Sister Nightingale, whose voice is light as bubbles in sparkling Orlesian wine, cast at a deliberate party pitch. Musical. Nightingale indeed. She began her life as a bard, he knows, cooing hymns with blades in her sleeves. Perhaps _she_ could make a convert of his otherwise Chantry-wasted wife. “A ruler of such ardent faith, in such troubled times? It would be so nice for Thedas to have somewhere bright to look, with such a good face. Surely you understand, Champion,” says Sister Nightingale. “Surely you feel the eyes on Kirkwall, and it makes you step a little more delicately.”

“Oh, my footwork’s a dream,” says Marian blithely. “Will they play music later tonight? First I bought you a drink and now I see you’re angling for a spin on the dance floor.”

“I wouldn’t wish to take you from your companion.”

“Did you know,” says Marian, “that we’re married in the eyes of Andraste? Does that interest the Divine any?”

His gut lurches. “Please,” he begins.

“Not that that means anything,” she continues. “No throne means no heirs and no begetting means no worries, eh?”

Everything he offered her, every pure pearl that tumbled from his lips, sounds filthy, now, in the perfumed air. “Please,” he says again. “Not among the guests.”

Not in front of Sister Nightingale, whose lips purse in fascination. “You’re right,” she says. “That will doubtless interest the Divine.”

“Why?” Perhaps his voice is louder than it ought to be. Would he were still the drinking kind, then he’d have an excuse. But excuses are weakness, the kind of weakness he’ll burn out of himself for good someday. With enough rigor, enough abstinence and absolution. “I’ve told you I’ve no interest in taking the throne back, and if I’ve a wife in the eyes of Divine Andraste, and have sworn myself to reforms in the city and chaste companionship to its Champion, what does Divine Justinia find to want from such a man? I want nothing more than this.”

A soft voice from behind him breathes: “Sister Leliana? Of Lothering?”

Sister Nightingale’s face tightens, her head whipping around so swiftly her hair beats her indrawn cheeks. “Who calls me so?”

Oh, he does not want to look back. But he does.

Here stands Bethany Hawke, a cup of wine trembling in her hands, eyes bright and damp. She takes an unsteady breath. “I’m sorry, of course you wouldn’t remember. I’m sorry to interrupt. It’s only, you used to tell the most beautiful stories.”

“Maker be praised.” Sister Nightingale softens, astonished. “Little Bethany?”

“You remember me,” says Bethany, eyes wide.

Sister Nightingale is a lifelong spy, a memorizer of songs and tales, and like as not remembers every name she’s ever gathered. This he knows. Yet now he can only think: _of course she remembers Bethany Hawke. No one could forget._

“And now—” Sister Nightingale looks Bethany up and down. “Oh, little love!” she says in a voice of inexpressible and baffling sorrow. All Bethany is is as the Chantry tells her to be, he thinks, and how finely wrought within her role. Yet Sister Nightingale takes her immediately by the hands and breathes: “You weren’t allowed to dress for the party? Oh, all they say about the misuses of the Kirkwall Circle is true!”

Bethany bursts out laughing, visibly too overcome to speak.

“How do you know my sister?” Marian asks tightly, and Sister Nightingale turns her head.

“Oh—but of course, it’s plain to look at you both.”

“Is it?” Marian’s smile coils like a whip. “I never know.”

“Yes. I should have known you from Lothering. Yet you weren’t so often at the Chantry?”

“No.” Marian shrugs. “The consolations of Andraste were Bethany’s, not mine. I was busy muddying my boots and grieving my mother. One of the three of us had to stay clean, I suppose.”

“Yes, that’s right,” says Sister Nightingale, who remembers everything, “how _is_ your brother?”

This to Bethany. Who closes her eyes very briefly. Her lashes are soft on her cheek.

This Marian set up, this result she takes and puts in her purse, sure as a coin, and Sebastian watches her do so: the tight-wound anger, the hurt that lands. He doesn’t know why she does it, when it has to hurt her just as much.

He does not understand his wife.

“He died just after the siege,” Bethany says with very practiced calm. “Before he could see Kirkwall at all.”

Sister Nightingale, the songbird, is silenced.

“Now you’ve upset my sister _and_ my husband,” Marian says. “I’ll take that dance later, if they play, but for now I think you’d best go off and sing to a different audience, songbird.”

“I think our audience isn’t finished, Champion.” Sister Nightingale nods to Sebastian, disarmingly. “Prince.”

“For now,” says Marian. “Just for now.”

She toasts, as Sister Nightingale turns, the Left Hand’s purple cape swirling about her heels. On her way past them, she touches Bethany very briefly on the—yes, left—hand.

The Maker places his pawns in a game beyond Sebastian’s imagining. Certainly his current one. Someday. A better Sebastian Vael will think better of his god.

“Was that as you’d hoped?” Marian asks, now, eyes cool on him. “Did you get all you hoped from the Chantry, or did Blessed Andraste withhold her answers yet again?”

“How do you know Leliana?” asks Bethany, voice soft, and— _ah, Maker!_ —there’s the gaze she’s been averting.

“Hawke.”

Tallis, at Marian’s elbow.

“We’ve an opening.”

Suddenly, spurred into motion again. Marian makes plans, heedless of them at her sides. “Before the hunt,” she says. “Right. Of course. Through the estate. And someone’s got to meet us on the far side.”

Her eyes cast over the crowd—Anders trying to fold himself up small behind Varric as the dwarf holds impromptu court, here as everywhere; Fenris and Merrill in Aveline’s shadow having some low and visibly vicious argument by a tower of pastries; Isabela trapped behind an old Orlesian—and back. “Fine,” she says. Points to Bethany and then to him, one and the other: “Nearest, dearest, you’ll go through the dungeons and open the door on the far side.”

“What?” Bethany asks. She gets no better than a snort from her sister.

“It’s not that hard,” she says. “All you have to do is listen and play along and walk in a straight line. And you—” She wiggles her fingers toward Sebastian. “Do protect the little dear. If any trouble arises, you be the one to get her out of it.”

Then, as ever, she’s all too quick to go.

Then, he is left with Bethany Hawke and half a plan. Less than half for keeping himself sane.

For a mercy, they have the shared focus of a mission tethering them together in silence. Now, alone, Bethany has turned her gaze from him. A mercy, a good thing. They get through a locked back door easily. Her fingers are deft on the lock, electric and coaxing. (Skin unburnt, he notices, then stares fixedly skyward until the door swings back open.)

Simple. Walk in the straight line through the dungeon until they find the opposite door. Get it open while somewhere far above them, Marian and Tallis are playing hopscotch behind guards’ backs. Just in time to meet their inevitable, glorious descent. A fine plan.

Fool him, he married a liar.

On the third, fifth, tenth circuit of the cellar—once they’ve lost count—Bethany explodes into a gusty sigh. “Damn this for a lark,” she says. “She couldn’t have drawn us a map?” She shakes her head angrily. “I know how an estate’s meant to be lain out. I’ve seen countless layouts in the library’s books, and this Orlesian maze is backwards from all of them.”

The air down here is dank, stone-cool even if the stone is smothered under Orlesian tapestries. A dark curl sticks to her flushed cheek. What a strange pleasure it is to see her even approaching the edge of anger. He’s never seen any more of Bethany than she’s willing to give. Only glimpses: a smile in sunlight as Lady Hawke, candles lit and burning too hot for the close little temple in the Circle. Varric calls her _sunshine_ , and Sebastian understands how easy it might be to bask in the brightness of her till he burns.

The anger clears from her face. She smiles, polite and puzzled, confusion crinkling her forehead. She has not been speaking for a very long time.

The demon got some crucial details wrong. What a misery to him that he can see the differences, that the demon had put the dimple on the wrong side, that she hadn’t quite got the laugh. But the way she wore Bethany Hawke’s smile continues to haunt him, and it haunts him double as he stands opposite the real thing. The demon looked him in the eye, and he has not slept a single night since without seeing her, the violet-tinged echo of something he loathes that he wants.

But he wants, he _wants_. He’s renounced what he was. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what he’s renouncing.

Before Andraste, in the privacy of his own thoughts, he makes his confession in dizzying clarity: if he was the Sebastian Vael of old, reckless and godless, he would cup her face in his hands and tilt it up to drink from. The reprobate prince is clever. He’d wait—Maker, he can only remember being so patient—but yes, if he was the young cruel demon of Starkhaven he’d wait with the knowledge that he was denied nothing, wait for her to close her eyes and offer herself up as a willing sacrifice. He’d kiss her once, slowly, until he heard what she sounded like when she’d been kissed senseless. Then once he’d drunk her purity and her ecstasies right up, he’d have her up against the wall, the rough stone against the silk of her hair, the rude Circle cloth rising up to reveal the satin of her skin. The high collar parting. Maker help him, he wants to itemize every flaw in the demon’s perfect picture, to know every inch of the real Bethany all the way down.

Present Sebastian Vael, wed to his savior, her sister, to his vows and his own self-improvement—in that order—does the only sensible thing. He runs.

At the end of the corridor, he hears her feet quickening after him. Stupid thing. Stupid of him. Maker, he’s gone so stupid, and Marian’s not here to stand in for the strength he lacks. She was meant to be safe, he thinks. Honored, cherished, worshipped. He’d been so grateful, by her side, that what he felt in her presence was never, not once—like _this_.

Bethany catches up to him. There’s only so far he can go.

“Sebastian,” she pants, “Prince Sebastian—”

_Maker_. Every wretched relic of himself in collision, in her too-lovely mouth. He clutches the wall.

“Have I done something wrong?”

“You?” He wants to laugh. Not even a demon’s imposture could truly make her seem like she was doing _wrong_. Not even false Bethany Hawke in the Harriman bed. “Never.”

“Then why’d you run off?”

“I caught a stitch.” He sounds like an idiot. “And I thought it’d give me a better idea of these blasted corridors. We’re short on time, you know.”

Now he’s being short with her. She flushes. There’s no reward to his meanness, particularly not when it makes that blush of hers worse.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m supposed to know—”

“There’s no reason you should.”

“Why didn’t you come back to the Circle?” she blurts out. At once, she looks horrified. “Please, never mind. I shouldn’t have said anything of the kind. You’d no reason to.”

“No,” he says, loathing himself more and more with every word. “Of course. I owed you—a last visit. I should have made my excuses to you as well as to Andraste.”

“You didn’t owe me anything,” she says. “Not anything like what you owe Andraste, nothing at all. I know you didn’t come for me.”

Her eyes are downcast. Those lash-shadows gating her face again, those corded tendons in her neck locking her words in her throat. He watches her swallow a difficult-looking breath and wonders, more than ever, what she holds back. If ever once she has let herself fully go. Her frown twitches at the corner, and he is wretched with the knowledge that some version of him wants to press his lips to that elusive corner of her mouth, to take her secrets in through his skin.

Even a more righteous version of him might not even be capable of withstanding her, he thinks, for she is mage and pure alike, force and will and Hawke lineage, a woman of truly fearsome scope behind her sweetness. The shadow sister is capable of lighting full rooms aflame. She should start with him, he thinks, repelled. Burn the Vael name to ash and let them all—Starkhaven, Chantry, Hawke women, all—start new without him.

_Why else would I have come_ rests on the tip of his tongue. Not for the poor and downtrodden, not for the abuses in the Kirkwall Circle, not for any Chantry-approved reason. Only her. Only ever the sanctuary of his unrighteousness.

Maker protect her from him, she does not deserve this.

Instead—by divine intercession indeed—they are interrupted by a clatter and thump from without, and he looks up at the end of the corridor. He’d taken a wrong turn, he realizes, when he fled. Or, in any case, the opposite of the one he’d intended.

By now, surely he’d have learned that his own intentions are always the wrong ones.

“That’s the door,” he says, and she’s already ahead of him. He follows the lock—not her, not the hurry of her feet and the sway of her hips, not looking.

This time they have a key, and the door swings open in two breath’s time, pouring in a damning amount of sunlight and revealing Marian Hawke at the side of an irritated-looking elf. “We made half your time,” Marian snips. “Were you doing somersaults through the halls?”

“You should have taken the time to steal us a map,” says Bethany a little more sharply than Marian, perhaps, expected. Her brows wing up.

“Dear sister, what are they teaching you in the Circle? Run along now and find a chaperone. There’re a handful of amusing options scattered through the party. I’d know. I brought them.”

“You’re so thoughtful, Marian,” says Bethany, almost snarling. A ruder girl would have pushed her way out, or at the very least elbowed Tallis, who stands by and smirks as she runs past.

“Sisters!” says Tallis. “Never regretted not having any. Nor brothers. Nor a family worth speaking of. What about you, pretty boy, siblings?”

“Dead,” he says, very cold. “All dead.”

She pulls a pout. There is not a trace of sympathy in it. For a moment it is a relief to loathe someone more than he loathes himself. When he dislikes another, he knows how to be courteous to them.

Marian, watching them as avidly as she watches everything, elbows between them to give Sebastian a fast and sloppy kiss on the edge of his cheek, dangerously edging near his lips. He feels branded for his vile thoughts, not that she can possibly know them so specifically. No, this is no more nor less than a public claim, one he can read, one he doesn’t have time to dodge, one he knows she’s within her rights to make. Sworn to her by Andraste. He asked. “Don’t despair, dear. I promise all this wretched criminal activity will be wrapped up before supper. We might even have time to say grace.”

He opens his mouth to chastise but notes, over her shoulder, that Tallis steps back. There, then. Marian Hawke always ends up doing the right thing.

What a blessing it is, to stalk in her shadow and defend her from harm. So long as she is the only woman in the room.

A blessing, too, that he loses sight of—well, of everyone that troubled him over the course of the day. Bethany, quietly, makes herself scarce, and Sister Nightingale is nowhere to be seen. Even the company dips in and out of sight. Marian, Isabela, missing, one after another, then both at once…

_Rivaini, I promise you. We could hear you._

_I doubt very much that Prince Vael was listening with open ears._

Yet, at the end of another exhausting day whereupon nobody died, just a few candlelit moments before another new friend had the opportunity to turn traitor—

_That’s your fault for recycling your character types, dwarf_.

_Bit of dramatic irony coming from Choirboy, though, don’t you think?_

_Take a drink, Varric, you look fit to spit poison. Wash your mouth out with ale and continue the—_

_Tale? Well, well, the pirate’s a poetess after all._

End of the day. Sunset lowering over an Orlesian estate: even abroad, what now but a ball? Hawke’s company had not come prepared to dance, but they had by and large come prepared to drink, which always makes the former far easier. By the time night had fully fallen even the unlikeliest members of the party had been cajoled onto the floor. Fenris, though scowling, had taken the hand of a bent old woman with a face like a fallen nut and had led her through the steps with surprising grace; a courtier with a pompadour taller than Hawke’s hat had charmed or been charmed by Merrill; Aveline had saved a rumpled and disgruntled Isabela from an old Orlesian and had, stiff-backed but sure-shouldered, finished the waltz.

All but Sebastian, who abjured the dance and the drink alike. Perhaps for Marian he might have made an exception. Were she to ask.

She does not ask.

The Champion, champion of the hunt now as well as of her city, sits in the centre of things, where she has always belonged. There by her side, surrounded by gossips, he would become Prince Sebastian Vael again, with or without his throne. The sort of companion the Orlesians thought the Champion deserves, rather than the one he had sworn to be.

Easy, then, to sit in quiet. To reflect. He sips cool water that must have been dipper-drawn from the fountain outside, for beneath its twist of lemon he can make out the taste of the copper coins the Orlesian company have always loved to throw into the water. So many stray wishes in his mouth. He wonders whose.

A brief flicker of red hair catches his attention, making him tense: the Nightingale flies again. At the top of the stairs, she makes her entrance with a companion, a girl on her arm in an Orlesian mask. Below, in her chair, between songs, Marian sits up. Her limbs collect themselves from where she’s draped them over nearby chairs, crisp at once as she salutes: “Do I get my dance at last, or have you found a new partner?”

“She’s found one of her little gaming partners,” says Tallis, her hand on Marian’s shoulder and her voice pitched loud enough to be heard from across the room. “Leliana always finds some new girl or another to keep her company.”

“I would be delighted to dance with you, Champion,” says Sister Nightingale easily, descending the stairs. She would be more than captivating on her own, violet-caped, graceful as a lapwing. They make a marvelous match as Marian bows to her, as she sweeps her onto the dance floor and whispers into her ear.

Sebastian does not watch. Does not watch how gracefully they spin, nor how hard Marian’s face grows as the Left Hand speaks to her. He does not imagine the whispers stringing beneath the chords of viol and harpstring. Once his eyes have fixed themselves on her companion, he cannot unfix them.

He stares, disbelieving. Willing to disbelieve.

He studies her as he would a stranger. Hair turned cherry-dark by candlelight, taller than the Sister and than most women in the hall, with a figure that calls those tales told of the Orlesian statue of Andraste to the fore of his mind. She stays put, far off, as though she knows better. On the edge of the balcony, her face masked in silver, her lips pursed just beneath the silver edge of the mask.

Her costume of finery lovely but imperfect. A blue dress, deceptively simple, but for the tightness of the bodice on a dress designed to flow loose. The sleeves have been rolled up from the wrists to disguise shortness, revealing sleek forearms, attenuated wrists. The neck is wide, for the dress wants looseness, and even as it clings to her it reveals the curves of her shoulders and the rise of of her—

Well. Ill-fit altogether, and rendering beauty in spite of itself. A dress that clings to her skin intimately beneath the lace shawl she has knotted around her throat. Over her bosom. Though it doesn’t quite cover it. As she crosses her arms and leans forward against the edge of the balcony he feels the blood drain from his face in one great wash.

If he only sits here for the rest of the night, perhaps the Maker will take pity and release the Duke’s wyvern and send it to devour his unresisting form. That would be a kindness.

On the dance floor, his wife twirls the Divine’s spy in her arms. Above them, the Left Hand’s masked companion at last begins to walk. She clutches the banner as though she’s out to make it splinter, her steps too careful, her shoes borrowed, her skirts high enough to reveal not only the borrowed damask and thin heels of those shoes but the white-stockinged ankles that tapered into them, white-stockinged all through the calf. And up, the resurrected reprobate thinks, and up, and up…

At the base of the stairs, he recognizes the swain from the gardens. The one that had made her laugh. The first to bow, now, and stretch his hand out.

Her skirts settle as she stands still. As she shakes her head, seeming immune to the music. If not, Sebastian might not have made it to his feet. Yet here he is: now standing, now walking. Watching himself make swift pace across the room without thinking, without asking himself, without any sort of guidance whatsoever.

Even young, even when he had been voracious to the point of madness and uncaring to the point of unhinge, his body was never so apart from his mind. Now, he reaches the stairs and bows, a clockwork pleasantry that relieves him briefly from looking at her lips and throat until his eyes travel back to her hem. There is no relief. Yet nor is there escape.

The niceties make themselves available to him in his thoughts, practiced from birth, but by the time he opens his mouth, he finds them all quite gone.

“I’m sorry,” he says, hoping she won’t make out the ragged edge of his voice. “I’ve behaved poorly to you. Let me do you a turn.”

“What can you do for me, sir?” she asks, voice pitched high and breathy and disarming. “This young man thought he knew me. He didn’t.”

This tempts. For once she tempts on purpose and he wants nothing more than to allow it. To let her speak and speak in just such a voice, as just such a plausible excuse. For a moment he thinks of playing ignorant along with her, of greeting her as a stranger, of pouring her a glass of punch and listening to her laugh politely whether or not he makes any jokes.

But he would never offer to place a strange woman’s hand in his, not the man he is now. He does not long for a stranger’s touch, the sound of a stranger’s laugh, the press of a stranger’s body.

He longs for Bethany Hawke’s.

“I owe you,” he says, insistent.

“What can you owe me?”

_My kind farewell. My wordless departure. My permanent absence, for the sake both of our souls._

“A dance,” he says.

She offers her hand. He takes it.

Small-handed Sister Nightingale had not seen fit, or able, to outfit her with gloves. How narrow her hand in his, then, how long her fingers, and how bare her skin against his.

The song skips along, lively and halfway finished. He takes her waist carefully in his and guided her onto the edge of the floor. He leans in to speak into her ear. Under her hair. His hand must be free from hers for a moment, then, and he regrets leaving hers caught in the air as he tucks her hair back. Until his fingers slide through the dark silk of her hair, and he feels as much as sees the curve of her ear burning with a hot red blush, and he lingers. He knows he lingers. He is making a fool of himself, a fool and an oathbreaker and a weakling, but his fingertips travel lightly over the curve of her neck and he cannot miss the way she shivers. Even through the curtain of her hair. Even under the mask.

_Maker absolve me of this._ For he knows, then, that Bethany Hawke will not.

Into her ear, he speaks as quiet as espionage, as quiet as gossip, part of the siege of whispers he’s hated all his life. “What’s Sister Nightingale doing, putting you in the game, Lady Hawke?”

“She didn’t.” She gazes up at him, the eyes of the mask wide enough that they hid nothing, the clear amber of her eyes dangerously honest. “She unpacked her trousseau and offered me whatever I could make use of. She had fun seeing me in and out of silks and velvets, not that we were of a size. I was the one that asked to wear the mask.”

“Why?”

He knows the answer, he thinks. But he’ll hear it from her lips.

“I didn’t want to be—you know,” she says, dropping her voice so soft he has to lean in even further. He won’t miss a word of it. “Bethany Hawke from the Circle. I wanted to be nobody. The Orlesians could take me for granted like this, even if I was the only masked one in the room. And my sister—”

The air draws tight between them. He waits.

“Well, she wouldn’t see _her_ sister. Not first glance, anyway, and who knows if she’d look hard enough for there to be a second? She sees what she wants to.” She looks up. “Surely you know that.”

Perhaps. But there’s only so much she can overlook. Not a desire demon’s temptations. Not a dance on the public floor. Not her husband’s milk liver and godless heart.

When he looks over Bethany’s shoulder, though, the Hawke is dancing with the Nightingale, laughing over her own shoulder, rapt and careless and not watching them at all.

Cities spin for the Champion. It keeps her busy. He exhales. Against him, Bethany is close enough to feel it, and to look up at him, wonderingly.

“How do you know the Left Hand of the Divine?” he asks before she can form her own question. She laughs, then—there, not a joke told, but not a courtesy laugh, either, just pleasant and startled and a little less nervous than usual—and shakes her head.

“I knew her when I was a child,” she says. “She told stories in the town square between Chantry services, and she had the most beautiful voice when she sang. I always supposed Andraste would sound a bit like her.” She smiles, mouth at least bare beneath the mask. “We get silly about the people we meet as children, don’t we? I never thought I’d see her again.”

“And she remembered you.”

“I never would have thought it.”

“Of course she did.”

“Why?” she asks, with a shrug she times to her next step. “I’ve never done anything special. Going to the Chantry service was as near as I had to free time as a child. No one searches a Chantry, after all.”

Hiding in plain sight. With or without a mask. She has never been any less than radiant, but she has always given the world excuses to look her over.

He says, low in her ear, “You are unforgettable, Bethany.”

The music flares, indicating time for a twirl. She spins out, long-armed, high-skirted, either a laugh or a gasp indiscernibly catching itself on her lips. As he pulls her back in, his hand braces against the small of her back. She is closer now, so much closer, the rising and falling bosom not fully hidden by her gown and shawl so near his vest he thinks he might make out her heartbeat. Or it might be his he hears, the thump of blood loud as a drum of war.

His fingertips touch the lacings that criss and cross up her back. Then, suddenly, the bare skin beneath the strings.

He jerks back, feeling a sharp shock he wishes he could credit to her mana. No. There is no magic in this, no strike of power. This is his own conjuration, sparked against the silk heat of her, the obscene hidden bareness of her, the stretch of the laces tight enough on her back that he can see without seeing where they dig minutely into her skin. He feels at once that he knows the entire shape of her beneath this dress, this dress that isn’t hers, this dress that doesn’t fit, this dance that fits him like his old clothes, this body before his that calls to his, that calls his body away from his vows.

More than a body. The demon was a body and a bad thought. This is Bethany Hawke, lips parted, cheeks hot, eyes wide, her thoughts maddeningly her own and relentlessly good. Temptation all the moreso because it is not, can never be, her fault.

He drops his hands violently to his sides.

“I apologize again,” he says and strides off the dance floor as quickly as he can without outright running. He saves the run for outside the ballroom.

This is the second time in just one day he has fled from Bethany Hawke.

He makes it all the way to the fountain, where in blessed solitude he can dunk his head in the cool copper-toned and come up gasping. Wishes. So many wishes. So much desire. This the Orlesians cling to far more ardently than any of their prayers.

He wishes he had a coin to wish on, then. Something to give up. But his purse is inside with the rest of his belongings and the last scraps of his sense, abandoned in the hall of Chateau Haine. Now he has nothing worth the sacrifice.

Except his vows.

Except himself.


	6. STRICKEN

_Varric pulls a face, and when he takes a drink he pretends to bob his head in the ale. There’s to Choirboy’s obsessive baptisms. Load of good they did him. “Wouldn’t that be a nice place to leave him?”_

_In pain for good, he thinks. Where he belongs._

_Even if Hawke’s not been a saint. Far from it. What comes after they leave the tavern—he shudders to think of. If she doesn’t come._

_But who expected sainthood from a lady so firmly bound to walk the dirty streets underfoot? Marian Hawke never needed to get to the Maker’s side to earn glory. She’s plucked it up out of the dirt like a forgotten coin. She’s fine where she is, thanks, and he knows she’d be the first to say so._

_Maybe that’s why they tell her tale, to preserve her exactly as it is. Before something dreadful happens to change her. To change all of them._

_Why they tell her tale: love, even as it feels almost like cruelty as they go on. This particular Hawke tale doesn’t have the bright light of heroism in it. Much as he loves a romance, this particular romance makes his favorite fury look downright mean._

_She’d be properly furious if she heard them now. Hard enough to get her to stay patiently between the pages that flatter her, never mind this. Maybe that’s why they tell keep going, Isabela’s eyes on the door all the while. Tempt fate to tempt her out of the house._

_Yet a small crowd’s gathered round as the wax drips and the moon fattens outside the window. Even if they’re just here to rest their drunken heads on the table or to stare in crazed schoolboy hope at Isabela or to listen to the dwarf with the most mellifluous voice in town—hey, he could read a grocery list and get a following. It’s all in the delivery. Doesn’t matter what he says._

_Which means he can’t tell what comes next._

_“Come on, Rivaini,” he says. “Let’s sleep it off.”_

_She looks him square in the eye. “We’re not going anywhere without her,” she says. “You know what comes next. We both do. What’s the point in denying it? Death comes for all of us in the end.”_

 

* * *

 

Death came for Leandra Hawke on her own. Nothing to do with Marian Hawke, the Champion. No blackmail to the black magic. She never knew if that made it better or worse.

Pointless looking for _better_.

What does she do, after her mother dies, once she’d put down the body and washed the blood and the foul magic bound up within it off her hands—all right, Gamlen first. Tells him with her voice flat, not looking at him. Leaves him in a blink, of course. There’d be no comfort in his embrace. Let him seek out Charade if he wants to make nice with a female relative he’d turned his back on.

Fuck Gamlen. Friends waiting for her at the Hanged Man: hang the Hanged Man. Others at the Rose: let the Rose wilt. Murderers stalked the streets: let them. For a night, let them all do their worst. It won’t come close to what had already been done.

Nothing can touch her. And no one, either.

Eventually, some come to her door. By then, the night is going pale, but that never bothered anyone she knew, anyone that knew her. Fenris, willing to skulk off back into the shadows when no one answered the door. (There’s a fine funeral gift. She is grateful.) Merrill undisturbed by the hour. (Not the little blood mage, not now.) Aveline, on the end of her rounds. (Aveline who had brought them all together into the city, eager to match up with her mother’s long-lost family—absolutely not Aveline, absolutely not tonight.) She could itemize the ones that didn’t come as easily as the ones that did, for now as always Marian Hawke understood her escape routes. Anders in the sick-belly of the city, doubtless scribbling with ink on his fingers and nose if he had a second to spare. Isabela, her Isabela—whatever she might be up to, wherever she was, at least she’s not causing a civil war this time.

More’s the pity. Would have been a nice night for a war. For a proper enemy, one that had nothing to do with her.

Who else. Who else. She paces the balcony. She takes her eyes off the door for half a second. Forgetting, by then, that the sun’s up, that there are others in the house whose good manners are damnably intact.

“Your highness,” she hears Orana say at the door, though she’s been told not to say that. It’s not her gravest wrong of the night, but that, she hasn’t been told against. Marian braces herself, biting her tongue. Orana’s voice pitches up for her: “It’s Prince Sebastian, miss.”

The sun is rising, the streets softly pinked and oranged by its early light outside. With the door open, she can hear Chantry bells chiming. At a distance so far away they might as well be on the wrong side of the Anderfels. Or in Starkhaven proper. She waits for them to go silent before she speaks, and then she doesn’t speak.

Sebastian stands in the center of the great Amell estate’s greatest hall. What a joke, she thinks. Last Amell that wanted it’s gone and it’s still standing. She ought to torch the place, to move into Merrill’s shoebox, to the tavern, or with Fenris and the corpses he’s left on his floor.

“Fenris was at service this morning,” Sebastian says, as if sensible of her thoughts. “He said no one had seen or heard—”

“My mother is dead,” she says. How cool she sounds. How cool she feels. Her mother is dead. What’s the harm in the words? They’re only true. “I’ll take a second to breathe before I go out gallivanting.”

“Oh,” he says, “oh my Marian—”

“I don’t want to hear it,” she says. She doesn’t. She doesn’t want to hear it from any of them and she’s heard enough from him already. Already she can feel him pulling for a kind of kinship between them— _ooh, wifey,_ my _mother was slaughtered in_ her _bed, and my father, too! Beat you to it!_ No, no, she amends for herself, for purposes of fairness. He wouldn’t make it a game, but only because he’s not the gaming type. Put that instinct right away, didn’t he, with all the rest of his ability to have fun. Locked away and far, far away from her.

She knows how easy it is for him to call up his own parents’ ghosts in his head, how much solace he finds in it. Well, she doesn’t think he has any business calling up Leandra’s. Enough calling her back from the dead for one night. Since she’s dead, let her lie. Let her rest. Let her _alone._

“Have you spoken to—”

“No, and I won’t till I damn well want to,” she snaps. Didn’t he hear her? “Everyone else will find out soon enough. Gamlen gossips. Kirkwall gossips. Some must know already. You can get the ball rolling if you want. It’ll take a load off me whenever I choose to go out, if you do.”

He looks up at her. Those sky-pure blue eyes, so pretty when they’re looking up. Toward his Andraste, toward the sky, now toward her. What a disgustingly unwelcome responsibility.

“The Circle,” he says, very formally. “Have you written to your sister?”

The purity of soul’s a lie. There’s not one pure thing left in the world.

You know, she doesn’t care what really happened at the Harriman house, vision or prophecy or what-damn-thing-ever. If he says one more thing she’s going to scream. If he asks her to put pen to paper she’ll break the pen.

“Go yourself if you care so damn much,” she says.

He looks at her. Just looks. She feels very small up here on the balcony and very alone. But he doesn’t come any closer. He gets the hint.

She watches him turn on his varnished-white heel and take himself away from her, back into the sun.

She snaps at his back, “You should be able to bribe your way in just fine!”

Below her, Orana closes the door without a sound. In the ringing silence after, she doesn’t know whether or not he heard her. It doesn’t matter. Nothing much does, not now.

The Champion of Kirkwall takes to her room and wishes that for at least one day that the city will forget she exists. To whom she wishes, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t pray.

 

 

 

And the other Hawke sister, so far from the city’s eyes? She woke up this morning under that selfsame sunrise knowing nothing, and that blessed ignorance has carried her through the day. Ignorance and prayer, prayer and ignorance. These are the cursed gifts of the Circle: time and seclusion. Practice and thought.

Bethany Hawke has said nothing all day to anyone save Orsino. Today was not a teaching day. Nor was it a sun-on-her-face sort of day, which might have made the grey stone silence bearable. Every so often her window catches the sun and when she closes her eyes it doesn’t matter where she is. She even has her own room here, which is a luxury she did not have in Gamlen’s home. She is blessed in this: the sister of the Champion of Kirkwall, Orsino’s pet, she has her own room. Which she knows to lock twice at night, but even so. It is better than not having a lock at all.

Yet on days like today the waves crash over the rocks outside like they’re fit to climb all the wet way to her window, and the wind catches in the window-frame and wails like it’s fit to speak for the slaves cast in bronze outside. Selfish to imagine she has any griefs in common with them. Particularly before she has any griefs to call her own.

Magic is not a grief, she thinks, stubborn, stitching the torn hem of her robe, eating her dinner in her bunk, reading the last novel Isabela sent her for the fourth time. She doesn’t blush this time. The next one will make her blush all over again but for now she’s used to it.

Still, she jumps when she hears a knock at her door. The book, she shoves beneath her pillow—no, not deep enough, under her mattress. Hastily she stands and smooths her robe, flicking her fingers toward the guttering candle. The flame flares back to life and she can at least see her way forward now.

“Who is it?”

No one invites guests to the Circle.

“Bethany?”

But they may come, if they are rich enough, if they are powerful, if they know the right palms to grease and the right backs willing to turn. Her sister knows. Not that her sister would. When her sister comes, she comes in the dark, she comes by her own terms. Rules don’t apply to Marian Hawke.

“May I come in?”

Not Marian. _Marian’s_ , though, for isn’t a marriage an extension of the self? In the last book Isabela sent her nobody was married but when they—oh, _consummated_ —they couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Such was passion. Such things are for her sister. She puts her hand hesitantly to the door and is so silent that she thinks she can hear Sebastian Vael breathe.

“I’m sorry to wake you, but it’s urgent.”

“You didn’t wake me.” She pulls the door open. “You’ll see, I haven’t even bathed for the evening, I’m far from asleep.” Her hand moves over her body, frantic, unsure where to land, and his eyes follow it—but of course they do, when she’s as good as pointing out where they’re meant to look. She doesn’t know why she does it. Only that she feels real when he is looking at her, as though she takes up space, as though the shadow she casts is one of significance. It’s a rare feeling. “Of course it’s urgent,” she says apologetically. “You wouldn’t be here otherwise. It must have been so much trouble—what’s wrong? Is it my sister?”

_Has she done something_ , she thinks.

In the doorway of her little room, Sebastian Vael looks at her with so much pity she thinks she can see it weighing on him, a physical weight. He takes one slow step into the room, and she watches his face crease, watches him open his mouth then shut it. A hand wraps around her heart and digs in its nails.

“What’s she _done?_ ”

“No,” he says, a beat too late. “Not your sister.”

“Then—?”

It can’t be _Carver,_ she thinks absurdly, he’s already—

“It’s your mother,” he says. “Bethany, ah! there’s no way to say this that will lessen the blow, I know, I know—Bethany, she’s been killed.”

There is an interesting ringing in her ears. Some instrument, no. The wind, no. Her blood. That’s it. Not quite a heartbeat. A rush like the sea.

“Bethany?”

She moves, very slowly, backward. Standing for too long is out of the question. Her room doesn’t offer much space to sit. It’s not fit for guests. She has nothing to offer him. She sits on the edge of the bed.

“Are you—” He sucks in a breath and even through the ringing she takes a moment to watch the pain flit across his face. How truly cruel, she thinks, she is able even now to think, that he is here, bearing this burden. “Are you all right? Is there aught you need that I can bring you?”

She says, “My sister couldn’t come tell me herself.”

Another breath. He bears the blows, it would seem. So no Hawke sister will have to. Then again, she feels like nothing can touch her now. A blow would be a welcome test against the new numbness in her limbs.

“No. You must pardon her. She’s grieving.”

“Grieving.” Bethany tastes the word. She supposes she’ll have to adopt it. That it’s already begun to colonize her from within. It will shroud her in the morning, she knows, and that will be another thing to take care of it. But now she is ringing and beneath the strange thick tingling layers of nothingness that sit on her skin she is angry. Somewhere wherever her heart is buried, it is livid. “Is that what she is doing? Where was she when my mother was killed? How did she die? Where did she die?”

His face is blank, smooth as paper. Grief washes over you like a stone until the edges are gone, she thinks, and he has such practice, has spent such time under its waves. “It doesn’t matter,” she says, watching his lips part. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll hear of it some other time. When it’s a story.”

“I should never have been the teller,” he says. “I should leave you.”

She thinks, Your telling is the only cruelty of the evening I can bear.

She thinks, Even now, I love the sound of your voice.

They are different agonies. She looks down at her hands and listens to the gentle clank of metal boot-casing scratching the stone, of him walking away. The candle is guttering again. Internally, she readies herself to relight the flame. Again and again until there’s nothing left to light.

Only then does she realize they won’t move. Her hands, that is. Not even when she tells them to. Not her fingers, and not the rest of her.

She has not moved since she sat down. Except her mouth, to speak. No one has taken that yet.

“Wait,” she says and listens to him come to a stop.

Without looking up, she says the last sensible thing she said. “I’m not dressed for bed.”

“No,” he says. “No one will—no one will think less of you for aught you do now, Bethany, believe me.”

“No.” She tries again, disbelieving. It’d be simpler if she could look up but her eyes are fixed on her still fingers, on the view of the stone floor behind them. “You see,” she says very calmly, “I can’t move.”

Even without looking up, she can feel his eyes on her.

“Help me,” she whispers. “Please, just. Help me.”

“Bethany—”

“Please.”

There is no one else.

She has not wept yet. Now she is near to it, and she wonders, if—if he touches her, if she will dissolve completely, or if he will make her new. Without moving her hands, or her lips, she prays; _Andraste, let me borrow your servant, only for a little while._ She must earn it. She’s been such a good Andrastian all her life, The Benedictions leap to her lips, her first favorite, her first consolation, murmuring in time with Sebastian’s footsteps as he crosses the room:

_Blessed are the righteous, the lights in the shadow._

_In their blood the Maker's will is written._

In _her_ blood, she thinks, imagining her mother—

“Bethany,” he says, and he kneels on the stone.

His hands take up hers. Even as hers rest limply in his grip she can feel the warmth of his, the bowstring roughness of his fingertips and the smoothness of his palms. The radiant warm brown of his skin. It goes through her. How cold it is in this room. How cold she has been.

“You’re shivering,” he says, and then he is silent.

Circle robes are built to be both simple and difficult. Every mage must put on their own every morning and take it off at night; there are no maidservants for mages, after all. Yet it is their shackle and their glory in one, their declaration, and there is extensive work for his unpracticed hands. He is not used to them, not as she is, and she is silent as his hands travel lightly and surmise.

Her belt unlatches, and that is a great relief. False gold links and the fur that wraps around her hips, to keep her warm in the chill of the Circle stone, go sliding to the floor in a great heap and she sighs aloud, and his head jerks up to look at her, at her face, his own agonized. Her fingers can move in his, then, just that much.

“Thank you,” she says and he does not ask to stop. He asks, “Can you stand,” and his hands are on her shoulders, and she finds that he can. Delicately, and very delicately, his fingers make their way down her spine, unlatching and unfastening.

He finds every latch. Opens her at the throat and the shoulders and all the way down her back. At last all this thick blue quilted fabric splits like a neatly cracked nutshell and falls from her body, leaving her with nothing but the thin underdress underneath it all—pale cream and sleeveless and light as air, she is light enough that the wailing wind might take her away at once, if it so chose.

Her skin would be so close to the air, if she had any left. But she feels he took that off with her dress, or with his news.

Or with his eyes.

He says, “Have I done all that I can for you?”

She says, “No.”

Tomorrow she will be wretched. Tomorrow she will be a good daughter, and the weight will fall on her chest when she wakes up and she will cry until the salt of it crusts not just her face but the hair at her temples. Now, though, the weight hangs over her head and she is weightless and she is wretched and her skin tingles and she is honest.

At last she is surefooted. She pulls the underdress over her head.

Sebastian Vael takes a step back. It takes him into the wall. She hears him bump it so hard that all of him rattles and Maker take her she laughs. He’s gone as far as he can. When she takes a step further, there is half a room between them, but he has stopped.

She makes her way.

“You’re grieving,” he says.

“Yes,” she replies simply. “And you want me.”

He _wants her,_ like one of Isabela’s novels, his hand skimming up her half-bared skin at Chateau Haine, her name in his mouth, she’s known the meaning the whole time. Maker help her, she shut her ears to it, she tried to be good, but she knew it because she spoke the language—she hadn’t needed a book to tell her what she felt when he’d touched her, when a thousand candles had lit the room when he touched her, like they do even now.

One candle in the room, now, but it’s burning as bright as it ever has. Bright enough that she can see herself in his armor as she walks forward, her legs and her hips and her breasts. So much of her she never gets to see, that no one ever gets to touch.

She does not look like herself; she does not feel like Bethany Hawke.

When she reaches him, he is not moving, though one hand of his is pressed flat to the wall so hard the warm brown skin around his knuckles has gone a pale grey.

“If you don’t,” she says, “you can go, but if you do, Maker _please_ —”

Barefoot, she is nearly as tall as him in his shoes, tall enough that her forehead can touch his. He is too close to see now. Even though he is beautiful it is for the best. Better for the both of them if they don’t look too close. Her whole body presses flush against the metal, which shocks cold against her skin, her nipples peaking harder than Circle stone. She shivers and despite the cold of the room and the cold of the metal, she can feel the heat between them. His breath in the air, his skin so near to hers, the earthquake tremor beneath it.

He groans so deeply she can feel it vibrate through the armor, and the numbness peels off her skin like another cracked shell.

“This is a sin,” he says. Near enough to warm her lips with his breath. “This is several sins.”

She can feel her heartbeat between her legs. Maker forgive her at least one of the Hawke family will live through the night.

“Lying is a sin,” she says. “Cruelty is a sin. This is a—a kindness, surely.”

“A benediction,” he says with a kind of relief in his voice, as though she’s opened the chantry door, as though she’s offered him sanctuary. His gaze flicks skyward then lands. On her. Her face, her skin—and his hands, at last, leave the wall.

His palm slides warm over her bare hip and the last vestige of numbness slides off her, to the floor, into the air, beyond remembering. Every inch of her skin is frozen and burning, like fever or frostbite, like her magic. Which has only hurt, she thinks. Never much healed, never much helped.

When has a Hawke woman ever done anything but harm? she wonders. Then Sebastian cups both hands against the small of her back and slides all the way up and she makes an awful sound, a wounded-animal wail, the cry that’s been threatening to cut through her silence for the last half hour, until he swallows it with his lips on hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Exactly the one thing I did to deliberately fuck with the canon timeline (as opposed to just being sloppy with it, which I am sure that I have been). Because I am a manipulative griefsex nightmare. Ya welcome.


	7. FRACTURE

_In the tavern, the story ends when the Chantry door shuts._

_In the tavern—_

_“Why so quiet, Rivaini?”_

_No one has gone anywhere for a good long while._

_“You’ve not much more to add, dwarf.”_

_True enough. The last drops of ale are drying sticky between table and tankard and the candles are pools of wax. Even Isabela with her knee kicked over the chair leg is not enough to keep the interest of her youthful admirers once the story came unstrung—as the Chantry door shut, so she shut her lips so tight the only thing that could slip through was sip after sip of rotgut from her flask. Better than anything behind the Hanged Man barstand, certainly, but she only brings it out when she’s feeling careless. The youths have milled off to the Blooming Rose and its fresher roses—to temptations in the flesh, not parables of it._

_The silence binds them now, fast with the not-telling as much as with the already-told. The story, tantalizing as it is, is not for yellow paper and print, not without the currency of Marian’s listening ear and sharp grin backing the production._

_Varric regrets it. The Chanter Prince and the Sunshine Princess would have been a fine tale._

_But not with these particular characters—he shoots a look toward the undisturbed door—not like this._

 

* * *

 

It hurts when he wakes up. The ache of relief, the room’s cold air on the scratches— _mercy_ —on his back, the press of something like grief behind his eyes. Not quite right, not quite his grief, but still the same weight. And the hollow in the bed, the divot pressed into the shape of her hip, that hurts too. He runs his hand over the indentation in the mattress, feeling the residual warmth of her body before he turns his eyes up and sees her.

Some of her. Bethany Hawke, her head and shoulders disappearing into her plain Circle underdress, the slope of her back still lain bare, and all below, the curving hips, the long legs and the lush shadow between them.

_Have mercy,_ he thinks in full, _Andraste preserve me_.

There is a comfort in having sinned, in having broken. Not broken his vows so much as broken his self, as easily as a porcelain plate.

The expression on her face. The pleasure of seeing Bethany Hawke when she doesn’t know she’s being watched, a quiet power, something that makes him, if profanely, understand what the Maker must feel when he looks down. And what he sees is enough to break his heart, the weight of the thoughts behind her eyes, the cloud on her features.

She turns back, and her eyes lock onto his, and for a moment the cloud lifts, and the sudden brightness goes through him like a blade.

Neither his vows nor his past could have hoped to steel him against this. Nothing he learned prepared him for an inch of her, not for a flick of her lashes, not for a beat of her heart.

Then the cloud descends, heavier than before, and she sits down heavily at the edge of the bed. Quite far out of reach, so long as he stays where he is. He feels the mattress move with her weight and tries not to think of it. His fingers clench on the sheets, against the deep curve, the print of her hip—he jerks his hand back, balances his balled fist on his tensed thigh, trying not to think of his half-hardness, trying not to feel anything at all.

The morning, still with the haze of a dream; the night, a dream no desire demon could have begun to stitch together. What delirium had taken him the night before—what delirium without excuse. He came to her sober as the stone. Her grief was not his.

He should have left her.

There is no version of him that leaves her.

Instead, he had put his hands on her and felt her unravel, and for his sins he was rewarded with knowledge, such knowledge—to _feel_ , rather than to know, the terrifying force of her beneath her skin, and the girl that held all that together. The way she came apart and came back together, the breath she took between her kisses and the way she closed her eyes against the tears and the way she’d opened them and seen him so clearly. As she felt him _in her_ , oh, Maker, how deep he’d sunk in her, and how slick and tight she’d been and how miraculous she’d found it, her ragged-short nails sinking deep into his shoulders and pulling him in. And still, not enough.

Andraste forgive him, Andraste forgive him _now_.

“I’m sorry,” she says now, voice soft and dull. “I’m sorry for what I did to you. There’s no excuse.”

“Bethany,” he says— _don’t rise, Sebastian Vael, who is neither prince nor faithful now, don’t lift another undeserving hand_ —“you did nothing.”

She laughs, the sound as dull as her gaze. Straight ahead, refusing to turn her face. He thinks of how to make her look at him—without a motion, without a touch. A motion in the corner of her mouth will drive him mad. The curve of her breast through her underdress.

“You will be forgiven,” he stumbles on. “The Maker understands our—our frailty, but He never gives us more than we can bear—”

At last, the fires are lit within her, though he hardly understands what he’s kindled. She turns her face, at last, so fast her hair slaps at her cheeks. “And how will you bear me?” she asks, eyes shot with red around the bright amber. “How will you carry the weight of my sins with you? For I’ve put them round your neck.”

“They won’t be sins,” he tries, desperately—there is a heartbeat pulsing in the hollow of her throat and the fabric of her underdress is twisted around her waist and he is so still a snake would not know to strike him—“if you just repent you will be forgiven.”

_You will. You_. Him, no, not he who does not deserve it, who has smashed his fidelities like a drunkard’s wine-glasses, not him who has used up his chances, but Bethany Hawke’s piety remains unsmirched. He knows, looking at her, listening. He, who spent a night holding her, touching her, knows he did not mark her.

She shakes her head. Soft, this time. The softness of those black curls, even matted with sleep and sweat and the desperate clutch of his hands—he closes his hands, now, very tightly beneath the sheets. “That’s just it,” she says. “I’m _not_ repenting. I won’t.”

For a moment he doesn’t hear her. Then he hears and he doesn’t understand. Forgiveness is so close to her. Sin has hardly had a chance to brush against Bethany Hawke, who has been kept safe all her life (and how a certain heartless prince of Starkhaven would have loved to stain that clean white canvas—once, he insists, _once_ ). Protected by her sister, her family, the Circle’s thick walls, Andraste’s own will—this he envies her, the knowledge that she is exactly where Andraste Herself has ordained she be. What does Andraste want from him? What can she want from him now? Nothing, and she offers him nothing, and his faith rings empty: he cannot offer her clean hands, nor a clean heart.

“But,” he says, pleading, “there is nothing for which you won’t be forgiven.”

One of them has to be, he thinks. Don’t let her be damned because he touched her. She’s not the one who swore oaths before the sacred flame, before the Reverend Mother.

“There’s nothing I want,“ Bethany says, looking at him with a kind of desperation. “Not from Andraste, not from the Maker, they’ve made their regard for the Hawke family plain. Who I should be begging forgiveness from is my sister, but—but hang that,” she says with such sudden viciousness that he starts. The motion tightens the sheets between them, and he can feel the roughspun fabric chafing his skin like shame. “Hang Marian for sending you to me last night, and for keeping you tied to her side the rest of the time. If she cared a bit about you she’d loose the knot. She doesn’t want you. She just wants you _with_ her, same as everyone else.”

“What,” he asks stiffly, “do you mean?”

“I mean she’s angry you don’t want her,” she says. “She married you because she thought she could—I don’t know, riddle it out of you, trip the right trap, whatever. It’s Marian. She finds the impossible thing to do and she gets whatever she wants as a reward once it’s done. But it wasn’t a trick or a trap, was it?” He sees her smile for the first time since he stepped into the Circle. It is not for him. It is almost cruel. She shakes her head, incredulous. “You really didn’t want her. And now you want me. You want me and you don’t want her, but she still got there first.”

He thinks of something he should say: that he married Marian Hawke because his feelings were pure and untainted, because he would have followed her blades and her will to the end of the world. The words are true; he could speak them over the sacred flame and it would not gutter out.

Something else: that the last night was, whatever else it was, not Marian’s fault. His brave lady wife, his savior and avenger. Very, very far now. He blinks and her face is gone from his mind’s eye. Just as Andraste lies facedown in the unbuckled heap of his armor, and he cannot look to her for succor, for all he sees when he looks at the armor is the reflection of Bethany’s skin glinting back.

The voice that comes out of him is low and profane and unreassuring, to him most of all.

“Say that again.”

She shivers at him, and her tongue runs over her dry lips— _Maker, oh, Maker_ —“What part?”

“I,” he says, he has to swallow. “I what?”

She stares.

“You want me,” she says, slow, clear, revelatory, just as she said it last night, and just as then he feels her words lick through him like a flame. “You want me. You’ve wanted me for a very long time. Like nobody ever wanted me. Like you never, ever wanted her.”

What a thing it is, to hear his confession in her mouth. To feel the burden lifted from his shoulders. Something else anchors him where he sits, now, something other than his guilt and his shame.

It is permission.

He sits up at last and at once the distance between them is an incomprehensible. At once his hand is on the curve of her waist and the bunched twist of her underdress; at once her cheek turns toward him, and she leans in, all of her, her lips and her breasts and her hair and her eyes never once looking away from his.

Just as he’s wanted, night after night, this time with sound and clear and wretched mind, he slides his hands through her tangled hair and kisses her open, offered, _wanting_ mouth.

_Maker_.

Just as he has dreamed night after night, here is Bethany Hawke abed and twining her limbs around him, her breath pitching high and urgent against his mouth. No hint of desire-demon laughter here, and part of him longs for it, for something to remind him that what he does is profane. He knows that—how can he forget it?—but the sounds she makes are such pure unfeigned music, earnest in their need and their pleasure, and she writhes against him, over him, and he is forgetting indeed in the harmonics of skin and breath. Her shift chafes between them, the raw linen sticking to her skin and his, and when he slides his hands beneath the rumpled edge and over the backs of her thighs she makes a soft keen of relief and sighs against him. Every inch of her.

His conscience takes in the lies her body tells him, the lies her body tells _herself_ —the raw urgent need in every motion, every breath, that only quiets with his hands on her. How heroic he feels, with his hands on her, when the pain leaves her face, when her lips part and her body goes quiet, when she invites him ever further.

Her body lies, to him and to her and to Andraste, and her quickening heart.

Not on purpose.

For this, if nothing else—not for himself, who is not worth saving—he pulls back. His hands on her face, bracing her. She stretches into the contact, and if he were better than he was, he would have found some other way, some way to save her that would not allow him to stroke the edges of her hair.

“I do want you,” he says, the confession written for him. By her, that said it first, and by the desire demon, that knew him best, and by his body, that speaks for him most clearly and humiliatingly. Beneath the sheets, every motion is an agony of stirring. The part of him that knows what to do with it—Sebastian of several Starkhavens ago—laughs at him for it. _My god, man. Put your hand on it, or hers, don’t just let it stand there._

Hers. On his wrist, now, her thumb stroking over where the skin is softest, holding onto him like the most beautiful of shackles. If only he never had to leave this room, he might willingly accede, stay and throw away the key. Perhaps it would not be so dreadful to stay here, with Bethany believing there was something worthy in him; perhaps her relief would transfigure into his worth if he was good enough to her. And he knows how to be good. ( _It’s her that wants it most, look at her lips, look at her tongue between her lips, remember the candlelight and think of what she might do to you if you did a_ good _job._ )

Last night, even the baser part of him thinks—oh, she was wonderful, of course, wonderful enough to deserve better from him. All magic, but of course she was: she was a flame in his hands, she consumed him and he let her. Surely by the light of day she deserves more than him _letting her_.

But that’s the stuff of demon whispers, of rose-violet smoke and wicked laughter. Bethany Hawke has never lied to him on purpose, not cruelly; she will not be the instrument of his temptation. That is his to bear.

He says, “I will die wanting you, I expect. But I won’t let you be tarnished by it.”

Her lips part—her tongue visible at once behind them; like this, he will die—then shut, her whole mouth shuts and her expression with it, so harshly that he can hear her teeth click and he can see the light die in her eyes. She swallows and sits back.

“When my mother’s funeral is set,” she says, “tell my sister to tell me herself. Have her write me or send me an invitation.”

This, too.

She is forgiven already and he is shamed twice over. He shifts, wretched, and tries not to think of Mistress Amell’s ghost—a woman he hardly met in the flesh, now conjured reincarnate by his shame. The sense that he has despoiled her daughter on the earth of her grave before it’s even dug—both daughters, in their way.

“I can make certain that you make it out,” he begins, laden down with guilt and, he knows, more money than he knows what to do with. Surely this is another kind of charitable donation.

“You don’t need to do anything, Sebastian.” Her voice is cool and removed, and for all that his name on her tongue still shocks through him. Even held in her mouth like unmelting ice. “I expect I can convince Orsino to let me out for a day, even if it does mean I have to bring a guard to the funeral. My mother wasn’t as prestigious a figure as Duke Prosper, you see, and I know Marian won’t bother with her _own_ coffers when it comes to this.”

“I want to do anything for you that I can,” he says, faltering, and she shakes her head, closing her eyes.

“You can’t even look at me,” she says, not looking herself.

_That is because there’s nowhere I want to look more_.

As it is, she rises and the skirt of her underdress falls and she makes a few futile motions of uncrumpling it and he works not to look this time, not to take her in, not to memorize each motion and each curve and each sketch of shadow over skin. Too late. When he blinks, he sees her vividly, and behind his eyes, she is even more dangerous. There, she casts off her underdress again and again, and sometimes even she smiles. Though not for him.

Behind his eyes she closes hers, and she bites the smile into her lip and shudders with relief, and even in his memory of the night before he has the sense he is looking on a private thing. Stolen, even, even if she did give herself freely. She cannot have known what she gave.

Now, aloud, she says “I’ll not watch if you want to dress yourself,” and he is chided into motion. Once she’s turned to the wall, he places a hand over himself and peels the sheet off with the other, careful as he can to not make an unbearable situation worse.

The sheet sticks to the mattress with just a little bit of blood.

He takes a breath and she looks over her shoulder. He cannot help the moment of eye contact. “Never?” he asks, hating himself unimaginably, and she shakes her head so hard and so angrily the motion takes her shoulders along with it. Yes, he thinks, slough him off. He’ll come out in the wash, though he wishes he could offer to do the washing—like a penance, like an act of contrition, water and cloth on her sanctified skin. Except it wouldn’t be.

“When would I have had the time?” she snorts, facing the stone once more. “And who dares to touch the Champion’s sister? Thank the Maker, as ever, for Marian.”

She doesn’t sound heartbroken, or rent apart much at all. That will be for him again: his sense of the sanctuary razed, the rubble around his feet.

Tugging himself back together in pieces, he places his armor back together carefully over his body, enshielding himself from whatever the day brings. Far fairer, he thinks, to cast it off. The white metal looks wrong on him; let his enemies try to find a weaker spot than the ones he’s discovered overnight. Andraste’s face on his buckle rubs against his persistent hardness, and he hopes someone does shoot him on his way home, and quickly, too. Through the throat, right in the tender mark left behind by Bethany Hawke’s mouth.

He leaves through the open door of Bethany’s chamber and does not kiss the bare nape of her neck visible through her hair. Precisely because he wishes, precisely because it feels devout.

 

 

The Amell home looms large in the neighborhood, larger for the presence of who lives within.

He should have gone to the Chantry first; he knows it, knows it down to the sweat in his hair and the residual stone-dankness on the back of his neck. At the Chantry he could have sought a bath and absolution in turn, but he could not envision stepping through the door like this. What a strange conundrum, he thinks, to be unfit for the one place that might sanctify him.

Here, the second, the first absolution. He knocks and the little elf maid shuffles him in, dipping her head, watchful and wary in one. No one in Hawke’s life knows how to talk to him, he thinks. He might have paid that heed.

But there she is, soon enough, stumbling back onto her balcony with her hands swiping over her eyes. His lady wife, in a house tunic of apricot silk too rich to be as crumpled as it is.

“Did I wake you?” he asks, and even from an indoor storey below her he can see her lip curl.

“Of course not,” she says, a lie or maybe not. Grief handles everyone peculiarly. He should be charitable: it is a virtue. And he understands grief and its thousand faces. (Made wild under Bethany Hawke’s skin, made dead in her voice.)

No.

Marian Hawke strolls down the stairs. “Come to make nice while I’m all fragile and weepy, have you,” she says idly, not a tear-track on her face. Of course not. She is strong as stone. “Well, I suppose that’s better than nothing. I think I’ll take it.”

She tilts her head and, from the bottom of the stairwell—near enough that he feels how much wants to run, even with the room stretching between them—studies him. With great focus, he does not turn away. “Something’s different,” she says, clever as always, clever as all Kirkwall in one flesh, and that’s all it takes.

He drops to his knees. Ignoble and ready, the armor weighing him down. Set underwater, he’d sink. Here, unfortunately, he has only as far as the carpet to go. “Marian,” he says, heavily, head down, and above him he hears a startled chuckle.

“Marian, is it? Look at all this sudden intimacy. I should play the tragic figure more often. Poor, _poor_  Marian.”

“I’ve broken my vow.”

The silence is everything he hoped for: a profound, punishing weight, absolute and sudden. It consumes him wholly—for all of a second.

Then she laughs.

This, unspeakably, is worse.

He looks up and she is laughing, laughing so hard she has to duck and hold her own face, so hard her cheeks hurt and her eyes burn—and he can see she means it. “Maker,” she gasps, “that’s _tacky_. Whoever decided last night was the night to move in, I’ve got to hand it to them, they’re good, they’re better than I am, but they still owe me a damn round. Perhaps I’ll make them do the first toast at Mother’s wake, what do you think?”

“What?” he manages.

“Who was it? I’ve been casting around for bets but I really didn’t think I had any players in this particular game of Wicked Grace. No one particularly seemed seduced, but everyone I know is full of surprises.” She takes a massive breath, laughter back under her control at last, voice half-wrecked and half-gleeful. “So who was it? Isabela?”

He blinks, hardly able to speak. Isabela? A bet? His head whirled, settled on bafflement—Isabela needled him, yes, but never so much as touched him. Immaterial to the moment, but if she wanted him, he would have known. He shakes his head, baffled silent. 

 

“ _That true, Rivaini?”_

_“The game had limited appeal. Surely you thought the same, or surely you’d have—“_

_“Oh, yes, that’d have gone off without a hitch.”_

_“Don’t fault yourself too much, Varric, you’re quite dashing when you choose to be.”_

_“You’re all silver tongue under that golden jangle. But you’re right—it wasn’t my favorite game Hawke ever set.”_

 

“Who, then? Please don’t tell me it was Merrill, she’s been acting _so_ oddly—”

He cannot speak. He thinks he’ll choke.

“Fenris, then? I did see him ducking off to Chantry the other day.”

“No!” he bursts out. “Marian, this isn’t a joke.”

“I can see that,” she says coolly. “You _look_ fucked-out. So who was it? I’m quite serious.” Her smile, wide and sudden, carries a generosity that almost reaches her eyes. “It’s all in fun. It doesn’t matter to me. The vow was always built to break, Sebastian, anyone could have told you that. Someone was standing next to you at the right time. I’d hoped it would be me. But you’re here, now.” She reaches out, fingers beckoning. “Stand up and, Andraste’s used knickers, tell me what I really want to know.”

“It wasn’t Fenris,” he says idiotically, refusing to dwell on the—well, _knicker_ question, used or no—and she snorts. He doesn’t have to take her hand; he’s halfway to standing already. “It’s not—it’s not in fun, not to me and not to Andraste.”

“I didn’t _ask_ Andraste,” she says. “I didn’t invite her in. Listen, I know the vow’s broken, but there are whole canticles about forgiving people who did far worse than fall into the odd bed, you’ve got to realize. It is what it is.” She shrugs, quick up-down, light on her feet, nearer him than he realized when he’d landed back on his feet. Not a statue after all. “And you’re here. You came here. You came to me, in the end.”

Her hand is on his chest. On the metal, sliding over the smudges and fingerprints that precede her, wiping it clean and marking it new.

“Who would I be to be jealous?” she asks. Her eyes dart across his face, not quite in earnest, but she talks like she’s teaching herself to mean it. “I mean, _I_ didn’t save myself for Andraste, and you damned well knew it all the while. You watched me. I hope you learned a thing or too while you did. It doesn’t have to be so difficult all the time.”

Her mouth is on his mouth.

She murmurs a low laugh against his lips, a hum of assumed recognition before he feels her tongue teasing the edge of his lower lip—she is practiced and confident, and she knows what she wants. That precedes experience, though he knows she’s honed it to the button. That, it would appear, is a Hawke woman trait.

He breaks the kiss, shuddering off of her abruptly.

He begins again.

“I went to the Circle last night,” he says. “Like you told me.”

A moment.

Another.

And she speaks.

“And you were waylaid into a passionate liaison with the Grand Enchanter, was that it?” Her voice is louder now, equal parts cold and strangely plaintive. “You used your trim form as currency to get in, so as not to sully your record with a bribe. Or one of the Templar guards was particularly handsome and speaking loudly of restraint and discipline by the door. Tell me that, Sebastian.”This too she shares with her sister: she can shutter open and closed at once behind the eyes. But the smile, caught between her teeth, that she keeps, even with no light in her eyes at all. “Tell me something amusing on the day after my mother’s death.”

He shakes his head. He knows far better than to believe that the presence of tragedy will absolve him. It’s never lightened his sins before and it certainly will not now, certainly not when it’s not even his tragedy to claim.

“I went to Bethany.”

The smile is the last to go, but it goes all right. Out like a light, like a candle pinched out between thumb and forefinger.

“Right,” she says. “Get out.”

He has nothing to say. Nor anything to do, except give her the one last thing she wants from him. His absence.

The door shuts quiet behind him in Orana’s hand. Hawke doesn’t come to slam it.

Yet as he walks away from her door, he leaves somewhat lighter than he came in: he has made his confession. Let her do with it what she likes, it’s the confessing that matters.

He is fit to return, at least, to the Chantry bosom—where he may castigate himself as he sees fit, but, he thinks, he won’t have to _explain_ anything to anyone. He has made his confession apart, and everything Andraste needs to hear, She has heard.

 

 

_Who will leave first? Now it’s sheer stubbornness that keeps them at the table, Isabela with her hair trailing against sticky wood as she lolls her head, Varric dealing and dealing and dealing for a game no one is remembering to play. Winning hand. Losing hand without competition. Winning hand, winning hand, hand that can be counterfeited into a winning hand if coupled with a winning smile and clever fingers._

_Perhaps he is asleep already, and it is a dream when he hears the swing of the door. The relief when he hears the heavy, familiar bootfall clomping unmistakably toward them is better than any dream, to be sure._

_Marian Hawke shoves herself onto the table, feet on the bench, sitting on the cards._

_“There you are,” he says. Easy as anything. It’s been easy between them since the Hawke family washed up on the Kirkwall shore, easy and irrevocable. Partners at first crime._

_Tonight she is angry. Everyone in the world knows when Marian Hawke is angry. It comes off her in waves._

_Tonight she needs to feel like something’s easy, so he shrugs into her presence. Deals her a hand. “You can pick that up with your arse if you like,” he says, indicating. He’s not going to put a name on her anger. The hell with Choirboy._

_Across the bench, Isabela lifts her flask and slides it into Hawke’s hand. The hand doesn’t immediately take it, so Varric watches Isabela wrap Hawke’s fingers around the curved edges and hold onto the whole package tight. The startling after-hours tenderness. Oh, Rivaini, he thinks, get a guard on that._

_Instead, she’s knocked unguarded as Hawke leans in for a kiss. A sloppy one. She’s sloppy when she’s angry and not the cards nor the flask nor the kissing is putting the flame out one bit._

_As abrupt as she started, she breaks it._

_“Where’s Anders?” she asks, and Varric is surprised by the punch packed into the expression on Isabela’s face, the direct hit of it. Even across the table. Oof._

_“Blondie?” he speaks up. “Haven’t seen him tonight. Off doing no harm, I expect.”_

_“Well, that’s no good,” Hawke says. “I want him to yell bloody ruin. About mages, about the collapsing city basement, I don’t much care. Maybe I’ll take the Knight-Commander’s commission tonight,” she says, laughing short and sharp—they look at each other, then, can’t help it, startled, and she only laughs more— “and maybe I’ll tell him. Oh, don’t look like that. I just want to let him piss in my ear for a bit, and I don’t think either of you are up to the task.”_

_She shrugs and hops off the table, picking a card up off the table in front of Varric, never losing her blade’s-edge grin. “You’re losing to yourself, Varric. Be careful. I’m off.”_

_“You know,” says Isabela, lightening her voice, “you look tired for the trek to Darktown, and there’s a perfectly good bed upstairs. You might stay the night. Anders’s manifestos will keep.”_

_“As will you,” says Hawke, diving in for another kiss before the blow can fully fall, “as will you. As will we all. Won’t we—haven’t you noticed?” Hitching herself against her hands, white-knuckled and dirty-nailed, she leaps off the table, her boots knocking heavy-heeled into the floor. “We can knock at it and knock at it and the world never really changes much at all.”_

_She leaves._

_The tale, as it always does, follows her—leaving the storytellers with empty mouths in her absence._


	8. PEACE (WAR)

**** A gang of robbers tries to hold her up on the way to Darktown, and Marian Hawke is _so_ glad. Small mercies, she thinks, driving her knuckles into the first brute’s nose, by way of small cruelties, the only kind Kirkwall deals out—she so desperately needed that. And that. And _that_.

No knives. Just blood up and bloodied noses, and a few pockets to rifle through. A ring to return to a beautiful woman—she hopes she’s beautiful, she assumes she’s beautiful, she’s friends with too many tale-spinners and no one ever started a tale with _A very ugly woman lost a very beautiful ring_ , at least to her knowledge. Perhaps she’ll give that one to Varric: the idea, if not the jewel.

Beauty, she thinks, is an overrated commodity, which it’s pleased her to spin backwards. No one bothers to call the Champion beautiful, they’re so hung up on all the other golden words they have for her. Which means that within the Hawke family it is rather a castoff adjective, and like all castoffs goes to—

No. No. She gives the first robber a final kick in the head and keeps going, going. Down the dirty alleys, down into the sour belly of the city, down to Anders, faintly shining in the shadows.

He’s got ink on his nose. Of course he does. He doesn’t look up until she sits down on the edge of his writing-table and runs her thumb along the tip. At which point he jumps, the recoil going through him and making every long limb of his body spring out from the tight-wound centre. Papers flutter. Pens roll. A good start.

“Hello,” she says, and he stutters.

“Hawke—I’m sorry—I was, I must’ve been half asleep sitting up, I don’t know how I didn’t hear you.”

“You were rapt,” she says teasingly, and then, “You would’ve heard a threat. But it’s only me, eh?”

He smiles.

Safety matters. She’s not  _his_ threat.

“How many nights do you fall asleep in that chair?” she asks, pushing all the way up onto the desk and crossing both arm and leg. “How can you live down here?”

“I don’t have many options,” he replies shortly. “I know you don’t like it. What brings you down from where the _people_ live?”

She inhales sharply through the nose, but she doesn’t have to say much. There’s blood on her vest, bruises on her knuckles. “Night’s work,” she says. “And the hypocrisy of the Chantry’s keeping me up nights too. At the very least I knew I wouldn’t be alone in that.”

Like putting in a key and twisting: he unlocks. It helps, she thinks, that she means it. And she does, she thinks, half-listening as he speaks and speaks. She does.

Every purpose she’s ever had has come to her first and foremost in the form of a person. From Anders with the light of Justice in his eyes to Fenris with the injustices of Tevinter on his skin, Merrill’s demons and Aveline’s work and Isabela with the qunari hot on her heels. And together, all of them in one place: Kirkwall, a place she so desperately loves. (Varric, writing its book at her side.)

Anders speaks of causes, in words she can sing back to him memorized from his own pages. Not so foreign to her, really. She has had causes—whatever it looks like; she _has_ them, even—and she’s meant them.

She means _them_.

She can do good for them, even now. Even now she’s angry; even now no one’s doing much good to her. No one’s doing much good to anyone.

If they go through her, though. If she has the strings in her hands, and they’re so eager to _give_ them to her—

Anders breaks off midsentence to pluck a leaf of paper out of her hands—she hadn’t noticed she was tearing it at the edges. “Glad to see you think so much of my writing,” he says, and the demagogue goes briefly dry. She laughs, then. Big. Sidesplitting.

“I know people come to you down here,” she says, gesturing to the desk, the paper, the dim little room. “They come for _this_. But Anders, you can’t stay. Not in the dark, not this long.”

Smashed drakestone sanding the floor, smudges of sela petrae on desk and wall. Poisons in the healer’s clinic everywhere she turns. Kirkwall, her city, is poison to the core.

She knows this, at least. Perhaps that’s why it chose her.

“Where,” he asks again, shrugging, “will I go?”

“Anders.” She rolls her eyes. “I’ve got a massive house. Not to mention friends with massive houses, but I do think I tend mine the best.”

His eyes are wide on hers. After a moment, he shakes his head. No. Not no, won’t; no, _can’t_. No as in, not possible. What a terrible thing: she’ll have to make a believer out of him. Almost makes her sympathize with—

“That fellow you married, Hawke,” he says, lip curling. “I think he’d have something to say about it. I don’t think he’d approve.”

“I’m not after his approval,” she says, “and he never moved out of the Chantry. What in Andraste’s knicker drawer does he have to say about my house?”

There’s an easy path to conversion. For some. It might even have worked on her, had the proselytizer given it a shot.

She slides off the desk, toe to toe with him.

Goodness, he’s tall. Tall and surprised. She puts her hands on his hips and feels him shake.

“Come home with me,” she says. “Stay as long as you like. You’re welcome.”

“What are you saying?”

“You’re my friend,” she says, looking up into his eyes. Heat in them, but that’s not the most important thing. Adoration big enough to drown the heat in its cool water.

He’s never once made a pass. But he _will_. She can feel it in him: the quiver of delight, a light turned on inside him that has nothing to do with Justice. (Even now, the back of her mind thinks _That’s new, too._ )

He loves her, he needs her. She knows. Knows enough to give back. Or give in advance.

So she leans up and kisses him, and how gentle he is in return. How giving. How kind.

Under her leathers, she’s still racing, still blood-high. Not that generous. Nobody has business being soft with her, not tonight, not ever. “Come on,” she says with a flash of her teeth. “You don’t have to put the kid gloves me. Bela told me about an electricity trick.” She wiggles up against him, hips flush, laughing. “Show me why mages are feared.”

How well she knows him by now. He doesn’t need to be asked twice. His hands aren’t sure on her, too needy, too uncertain with longings both specific and undefined, but his magic is. Mana skittering over bare skin, leaving shocks of pleasure. She expects to find scorch marks later, under her clothes—but of course they don’t leave marks. Of course she’s placed herself in hands that would never hurt her.

 

 

 

_I have sinned,_ said Sebastian in his confession to the Grand Cleric. _Sinned of the flesh, compromised my vows._

Somehow, to her, he didn’t find himself saying _broken_. Not that he disputes the breakage. He can feel the cracks plain as anything, in him, vivid as bone smashed under sword and shield like the wages of a battle left unhealed. He’s been lucky up til now. Has fought at a distance up til now.

But: _compromised_ , instead. So she doesn’t ask _How_. Doesn’t ask _Who_. Her eyes, kind to him, cooling, and he could see her filling in the image. The rude tongue of the Champion, the rudely clever hands of his lady wife. The map of her journeys, through streets high and low, filthy and clean. Keeping all sorts of company, and inviting him in.

_Be cleansed,_ said Elthina and he has tried. Ablutions of the spirit, doing what water won’t do to the flesh: to wash away not only what’s on the surface but where it’s been. He reads his verses, sings his Chant when the sun comes out, and stays within the church doors.

His penance has been, for once, in line with Hawke’s desire: he has stayed away. And he has not returned to the Gallows. This proves his mastery over himself, though he will not tell himself so, not in these words—it lends evidence, if to no witnesses, to his willingness to keep his sins from its door. From Bethany Hawke’s bare freckled shoulders.

Inside and away until his banisher’s voice calls him midstep in the Chantry halls. Hers and the Mother’s behind a locked door, rising in fury. And a third it takes him a moment to recognize as the Darktown mage’s. Why in the name of the Maker would she bring him here? Why on earth would she want to come?

The door jars open and he is in the hall, a book of prayer awkward in his hand. Her steps are forthright. Anders sees him before she does.

“Sebastian,” he says through set teeth, and she looks up.

Her eyes are hard, closed.

“So,” she says, “you’ve junked _all_ your vows.”

His hand tightens on the book of prayer. For a moment he thinks he’s heard wrong. Perhaps the book has spoken to him—some of them do, whispering from this shelf or that. Prayer and pleas. Every Chantry dweller has to learn not to hear them. They speak fears into being; they lie.

Then Marian Hawke treads as far as his toes and he can feel his chest tighten, the way she wears her enmity so much like the way she’d worn love. Lust. Whatever it had been, when she’d wanted him—she’d been angry then, too.

He doesn’t want her as an enemy. Not the woman who cut his family’s killers to pieces, not the Champion, not his savior, not his comrade in arms. Crossing her arms, now, and leaning back to look him contemptuously in the face: “You don’t fight,” she snaps, “not in nor out of these halls.”

He regains himself, or most of himself. “What’s to fight here?”

“That craven old woman,” cuts in Anders, the words spilling out of him, “that coward—”

“How dare you,” Sebastian snarls, and for a moment, there is no Champion in the room, no old wrongs, no old guilts. Only his anger, shining within him against a suffocating shadow of blasphemy. No one in this room knows Elthina’s kindness. No one here spares a stray thought for the Maker, for His bride.

_His_ bride snaps, “Do you know how little Elthina has done for the city? She knows what the templars have been doing when nobody has their eye on them. She knows what’s happening—“ and her breath is tight and sudden—“in the Gallows.”

There are the wrongs, the sins. Alive in the room, glancing away. Bethany’s turned head, the dark tumble of her hair, the sick gulp at the base of Sebastian’s throat.

“She won’t say a word for the mages,” says Anders, hot and blind, “she won’t risk her neck. Even _Orlais_ is braver—”

“Anders,” says Hawke and places her hand on his.

Sebastian can weigh only one thing at a time, and the sharp, immediate revulsion with which he says _Orlais_ goes quiet next to the equally immediate contact of their hands. Her soft, deliberate touch, the way she looks at him, and looks, and looks.

That sick heave still in his throat. Not for her, not for this, but how easy it is to be angry with this. Anders glaring at him, his blond head fairly scraping the ceiling over Sebastian’s head. Marian Hawke dragging her pet rebel in to make a scene in the Grand Cleric’s office.

“Where are your other friends?” he asks, fastidious as he can, and an odd note of regret breaks through her gaze. Her hands are once again her own.

“They might have been yours as well,” she says.

When she leaves, he sees the back of her neck stiffen. _Not now,_ her body says, the echo of her presence. Her footsteps deliberately, indelicately heavy, scuffing as much Chantry carpet as she can manage _. Nothing that is mine can ever be yours._

There is a note of clear relief in him, once she is gone: he knows few things better than he knows disgrace. From his vantage on the balcony, he watches the pair of them descend the staircase, growing smaller and smaller stair by stair. Until they disappear through the great door.

Feet archer-light, he follows her path.

She is out of sight once he exits the Chantry foyer, but doors are left open in her wake, freeing clouds of incense and more of those shadowed whispers, statues and texts and chanters’ echoes. Once he arrives at the temple, she is far gone. The temple is between hours, between services. It gives audience to just one figure, her head bent beneath a hood.

The aureole of the candles shine gold on purple silk. He knows at once. _Orlais_ —and still, it takes proximity for him to believe. The scent of Orlesian lavender perfume rising amongst the clean burn of wax in the air.

“Sister Nightingale?” he says aloud, and she looks up.

Well. One of them is surprised.

“Prince,” she says, pleased enough to see him. Pleased as those ice-blue eyes will reveal, that practiced voice. Her veneer is more brittle than next time. Wax after its second melt, readier to crumble. “I get my audience at last.”

“What audience?”

She takes a step—she is methodical with it, light on her toes—there are bodies at her feet. Guards. He takes a step back, careful of his feet. When he looks up from being careful, she wears something resembling her sparkling-wine smile, the one that makes her pleasant company at parties, but she’s pulled it on crooked like a hastily changed dress. He is heavily aware of the heavy silences and the wrong perfumes in the room; still, he would not change it for the last time he saw her. Her masked companion straining her borrowed seams. _No._

But the Left Hand sees _him_ this time, where before she only saw—

“I got to them ahead of the Champion,” she says with a little shake of her head, a whip of orange hair. “She’s so eager. So quick on her feet, with her hands. Coin from both the Grand Enchanter and the Knight-Commander jingling in her pockets, like proof of compromise. Will her quickness be enough to save her city, do you think? The Divine isn’t convinced, but I’ve told her: one woman has done more than this for the Chantry before.”

“If Marian heard you accusing her of helping the Chantry,” he says dryly, “she’d turn the knife on _you_.”

“No,” says Sister Nightingale. “She understands doing duty for the place you love. Divinely ordained duty, even. She was brought to Kirkwall, not born to it, no? Yet here she is, and its last and best hope.”

She’s right.

Marian Hawke walks in the shadow of Andraste, whether she likes it or not—translates the bright flame to the dirty streets. Runs in the family, that, he might think.

_Stop thinking._

“You,” she says to him, a slim finger aimed at the centre of his chest, pricking at his armor with more intention than an arrow. “Prince. What’s _your_ intention. You might bring the Grand Cleric out of the fray, and surely your lady wife would understand—”

“Understand,” he asks, “what?”

Sister Nightingale blinks, slow, cool.

“Your leaving,” she says. “With the Grand Cleric. The Chantry of Starkhaven is not so unruly as that of Kirkwall, not so plagued by adversity. A prince dedicated to the faith might make it more than safe—might make it sacred, if you would sit the throne and grant sanctuary to those threatened in other chantries. If you were willing to shine Starkhaven up as bright as that armor you wear, it might divert attention from the shadows here. Is it for the Champion alone that you stay?” Sister Nightingale looks him square in the eye and says again: “She would understand.”

He cannot see the version of himself the Sister is so intent on seeing. Not placed next to Marian Hawke, baptizing her city in blood and making it clean.

“Or—” Sister Nightingale pauses, purses her lips in a courtly moue. “Why were you not with us earlier?”

“You met with Marian?”

There, she sees him differently now. Closer to what he is, which is: alone and out of his depth.

“What has passed between you and the Champion?” she asks.

“Nothing.” He shakes his head, rough on the word. It’s nearly true. “ _Nothing_. What did you say to her about Mother Elthina?”

She gazes at him steadily.

“I hope to speak to you in Starkhaven, Prince Sebastian,” she says. “I hope to see you in your own kingdom, or in Val Royeaux in triumph. But this, I see, is not your city.”

The Nightingale slips past him, a lavender knife. “Be careful with her,” she says, and he does not know if she means Elthina or the city or Marian Hawke, who needs least care of all. He watches her shadow, breathes in her ghost, then finds himself alone by the altar once more.

When he races back inside, all purpose, Elthina is at the door to her office. When she looks him in the eye, he sees a door shut that has only ever been open to him.

“Don’t you take her part,” she says. “I’ve been _warned_.” Her lip curls on the word, an unfamiliar expression on her worn kind face, a borrowed inflection from a scornful source he recognizes. “Warned by a woman who lets the Knight-Commander line her purse and drags apostates through the Chantry halls. She’s got them both in hand, and she holds both hands directly against the flame. You should know better, by now, Sebastian. I’m not going anywhere.”

_It is Andraste’s duty to be impervious to flame,_ he thinks, and then, _but the rest of us aren’t so invulnerable._ Maybe not even Elthina. The thought hooks in him; he has never envisioned a world emptied of her. Not while he’s in Kirkwall. Not while he’s this lost to the world.

“Mother,” he begins, and she lifts her hand, cuts him off. The rest of what he intends to say dies on his tongue. He would never tell Anders that he is right, but he is right in this: the Grand Cleric closes her ears once she’s made up her mind. What, of course, the apostate doesn’t understand is that she is right to do so. Not even Val Royeaux’s own emissaries can move the Chantry’s mover. Certainly he won’t be able to do much better, and he has given her no cause to listen: the last time he tried to change her mind, he was sliding a ring onto Marian Hawke’s finger.

“She’s not so bad as you think,” he says instead, already defeated, but still owing her, after all. Both of them, mother and wife, and the echo of a third woman to whom he is kindest and cruelest of all as he does not speak her into being.


	9. BATTLE

Someone has to mourn Leandra Hawke. Surely, thinks Bethany, there is one person left in the world to carry this—for it is not her, not if she cannot leave.

The last time she left the Circle was on particular dispensation from Orlesian royalty, and indeed it took her mother’s rallying to open the doors. A purse for the First Enchanter, a plea for the weary guard. It takes force from without, far greater than Bethany’s meager own.

She knows better than to ask—for the guard has grown warier, harder. They will not let mages out, not for trifles and not for trials, and what is a dead woman to them? Dead is dead, and Leandra Amell’s name lost a good bit of its luster in the shadow of the Hawkes.

And no one comes to plead for her. Not her sister. Nor anyone that loves her sister.

Isabela still sends books, though her notes have shortened to a simple _To Kitten—_ no news, harder and harder to hear her low warm voice behind the words. Alone, Bethany supposes maybe it’s better she’s not hearing the words on the page as read by Isabela. Isabela, who’d loved her sister.

Isabela does not come; nor anyone else. Not one.

It’s different, now, the reading. The knowledge of how thick the walls are and the door, how nobody can hear her when the door’s shut. There is something freeing in this, knowing it for a reason that isn’t just the time no one came to save her when she screamed. Freeing, too, that she understands her body now, differently. Better.

She doesn’t regret the knowledge. That, at least, has stayed with her. A force that moves her hands between her legs, tugging up her shift and pushing her knee over a pillow. She remembers him. At least she had that, for a time, for a night, for a crack of lightning: his hands on her bare skin molding her into something closer to what she wanted to be.

She doesn’t regret and doesn’t blame him for not returning. Nobody returns to the Gallows if they don’t have to.

And no one in the Gallows leaves. Not with permission, anyway, not with an invitation, not even with a guard.

These days, when a mage leaves the Circle, they don’t come back.

She doesn’t know where they go. Oh, she can guess what _happens—_ the warning-tales tell themselves. The newly Tranquil in the library, the stable. (No friends of hers: call it the grace of not having friends.) The perennial rattle and stamp of Templar boots in the halls, the way her fellows huddle together and turn away when they pass. Like passing demons. It strikes her as a bit childish, in the uncharitable part of her heart, this flinching. Apostasy trained her to make herself invisible without moving an inch, taught her to distinguish between friend, foe, and neutral just based on the weight of the passing tread.

Apostasy trained her in keeping her gaze steady and her heart beating, so she does what she always does. She works to make her world take shape, even as the world’s chaos and her own grief pull and push at the edges. She sings the Chant and tends to the children and novices there. Even to the sick, as much as she can.

No healer, she: when her fellow mages arrive at service or dinner or lessons with scrapes, eyes blackened, cuts shining on the uppermost planes of their cheeks or bruises low on their throats, they do not ask her aid. The wounded speak of _the doctor_ but they go quiet when they notice her eyes. Her whole, unbroken skin.

Not all that leave are taken. The bruised and daring remainder, they see her sister’s fame written high on her face, they see her seat scribbling at Orsino’s side. She is untouchable, though she isn’t, and no one will tell her anything.

So she doesn’t ask _for_ anything and she doesn’t ask _why_ anything. So much silent listening, and mustn’t look too special, anyway. Not when the company is—thinning, as it is. She stands out enough as it is.

Orsino tells her to write down what he says; she does. An unpaid scribe. It’s something to do with her hands other than lighting candles. And thinking about—

No, no. Eyes forward, Bethany. Good little Bethany, who’s here for her own safety.

Her mother’s heart broke, when she was taken, but after her first letter of grief and her second of resignation, Leandra Amell wrote of relief.

Just once, all right, she asks. Can’t help it. End of a long day, three new mages gone missing, accused of blood magic, and the accusation hits her square in the throat. Harder than usual.

“My mother’s wake is coming,” she says, and Orsino’s hand goes to her shoulder before she can finish the sentence. A soft touch, sympathetic, unbearable.

“Child,” he says. “You can’t expect this.”

As though she has ever been known for her expectations.

Still, still—she looks him in the eyes, feels how his hand trembles, hopes that a door has been pushed open. Just a crack. Just enough to let in light.

So she remembers the date that Leandra Amell is to be lain in the ground (the numbers gleaned from a scrap of paper shoved into a copy of _Hard in Hightown,_ that came in the mail. In which is written: _There are things for which words aren’t enough. But here, Sunshine, dry your tears with mine_ ).

She counts the days down. Hour by hour, sometimes. She has so little to look toward.

When the day comes, she is waiting. When her door opens.

She asks, waveringly, when the shadow falls over her—long and robed—“Orsino?” Not letting herself hope for anyone else. Just this, only this, this small and wretched thing. Let her out, let her plant her feet in the turned earth of her mother’s grave and say this much: _I miss you, I’m sorry._ She swears to the Maker, she won’t even cast her eyes through the massed mourners, she won’t look for anyone at all.

It isn’t Orsino.

Then everything is shadow; everything is dark.

 

 

 

When she wakes up: sand underfoot. No, under-cheek, and when she gasps for a breath it goes into her mouth. Voices, just too far off to hear, keep her in check. _Don’t cough, think:_ she focuses on the cloth over her eyes, the bindings on her wrists and ankles, the pain in her head, the sluggishness in her blood. They took her staff, of course, but there’s something more than that holding her back. 

Focus, focus, cast out even if you can’t cast, she thinks: focus on the scents of salt and mildew masking the rising sharpness of blood in the air. People have fought here, and maybe some died. Inevitable for the site of a kidnapping, she supposes. Is that the rush of blood in her head or the waves?

_I’ve never been to the Wounded Coast,_ she thinks, absurdly, lips to the sand.   The only freedoms she’s ever know have come when the worst thing finally happens. Something newly, inventively worse, but it's always the same thing, isn't it: being  _taken_.

That makes this the farthest outside the Chantry she’s travelled since she was allowed to traverse the Orlesian border. That there was a world that allowed her to step so far seems mythic now. Chateau Haine, her pulling on Sister Leliana’s ill-fitting clothes—a sweet dream, the images vivid behind her blindfolded eyes.

The last time she’d been near her sister, too. Her sister and her sister’s people. Almost one of theirs. One of—

“She’s one of ours,” says one of the voices, nearer now. Maybe familiar. Maybe it’s the steady throb in her head, warping everything into a strange intimacy. She already knows them. Look what they’ve done to her—nearly set her free.

Here, on the sand, she listens.

“And a lucky thing, too,” says a woman’s voice, colder than she imagines the sea. “Close enough to catch.”

“She’s one of _us_ , Grace. If you kill her the Templars won’t blink an eye.”

“She’s the Champion’s sister, and she’s the one we want blinking. And the champion’s letting the Knight Commander weigh her purse.”

“And Orsino.”

“Orsino,” says the woman—Grace— _Grace_ , imagine; oh, Andraste, she nearly laughs into the sand—“is a fool and a coward that sees his own flock being slaughtered and turns his face. He’s no help to anyone, and a coin from him must sit light in the Champion’s purse indeed.”

“Now, now.”

An uncompromisingly familiar voice. More familiar than the ache, more familiar than Bethany’s heartbeat. Though she didn’t remember _how_ hard, how cool.

“It’s not the weight of the coin, it’s the weight of the purse.”

Marian. Oh, Marian.

A rock cuts into her cheek. Good. If she pushes her face just right into the sand, she can push her blindfold up just a little. Just enough to see the shadow, longer than the short wiry woman that casts it, and the tips of the boots.

The armor her sister is wearing—the greaves at least—are new, red-and-black and shining. Nothing shabby for the Champion. Her heels are sinking into the sand with the way she rocks back onto them, pushing hard against any ground on which she stands.

“You interrupted a funeral,” says Marian, “friends.”

“There needn’t be another,” says a third voice. A man’s, and one she’s sure she doesn’t know. “We only wanted to talk.”

“You wanted to talk _today_.” Marian snorts. “All right. Talk.”

“The Knight-Commander is a madwoman and a murderer—”

“Right,” says Marian, slow and lazy and amused, “and you made your point by—”

“Andraste’s name,” says the first boy, the _one-of-ours_ boy, not a man, Bethany decides, made younger in his fear, “we’ve got your _sister_ , you might do well to hear us out!”

“Right,” says Marian again, with the same lazy humor. Only Bethany can see her rocking heels come to a hard halt. “Why did you do that?”

“To get you here.”

She laughs. Short and cool. The rocking starts again. “The messenger said it was someone close to me.”

The ache in Bethany’s head is nothing to this. The needles in her ears, the blade slipping clean between her ribs.

“Try her,” says the woman. Grace. “Kill the hostage.”

“Don’t try me,” snaps Marian, and Bethany had forgotten just how fast her sister moved. Even when she can’t see it. Especially then.

She’d never had any lost love for battles—perhaps the one true relief of being in the Circle was she could stop killing for sport. She’d been all right, when she’d had her staff. And the moment the force under her skin was freed, that was exultant, every time. There is still nothing else like it. (One thing, one lightning-lit night, perhaps.) But not worth the fall of the bodies at her feet, around her. And the crush of fear, and the thrice-cursed _pointlessness_ , when she’d spent her whole life doing nothing but trying _not_ to get killed.

Now, suddenly, battle around her, battle over her, and all she can do is curl into a ball and wait for it to be over.

The anguish coupled with the pain is enough that it passes. She passes. She doesn’t remember. There is a thud, a crash, a set of cries, and then: nothing.

A hand on her forehead. On the blindfold. Ungentle with it, yanking it off. “Bethany.”

Before she opens her eyes, she opens her mouth. Speaking proves difficult. Her tongue is fat and raw in her mouth: she’s bitten it.

So she opens them, and there’s Marian. The newly armed Marian, resplendent and terrifying. For a moment, there is fear in her eyes, and something so terrifyingly bare behind it that Bethany has the sense of looking at her sister with no armor at all.

She sits up, and for a moment she thinks her sister’s arms will be there for her. Oh, she’s not a good sister, but she’s hers. The last other living Hawke woman on the earth, treading the same Kirkwall dirt, the same sands.

Once she’s upright, her sister is standing. Far, again, with a face closed tight as the jaws of a sprung trap. “Well,” she says, “you’re alive. Soak in that, I guess.”

“What happened?”

“They thought you were my weak point.” Marian shrugs, shifting the enormous spiked shoulders of her armor. With the sun at her back, she is angles, only angles. The sharp cast of her cheek, the edges of her hair, and all this honed metal. “Fool them. I don’t have weak points. I thought everyone knew that by now.”

“But _why_ —”

It’s the first time she’s been able to ask someone from the outside world what’s going on, and it’s plain as nails Marian doesn’t want to throw her a spare word. “Me, all right?” she snaps. “The world’s gone to hell in a basket of hot rolls and all sides of it are bound and determined to _fuck_ with me, that’s as far as I can tell.”

She looks around.There is a templar body on the sand. And a monstrosity—a pride demon, stretching at mage’s robes. Bethany flinches. Marian sees.

“Get up,” she says, “and go home. Fresh air is overrated in these parts.”

“Yes,” says Bethany, nettling, “I should be thankful. Right?”

When she stands, she’s taller than her sister, for all her sister’s armaments. Marian never liked that. Tall enough to look easily over her shoulder. There’s Fenris, looking steadily past her, a faint angry flush under the lyrium tattoos on his cheek. There’s Anders, eyes on the sand, vibrating with the effort of keeping still in mixed company: there’s a templar at his side, and she doesn’t understand why there’s a templar here and not a mage, why _he’s_ who’s left standing. There’s Varric, and he, at least, sees, but the sorrow on his face baffles her. He’s not the one who had to bury his mother. He’s not the one cutting his losses today.

Marian’s metal shoulder knocks into hers. “He’s not here,” her sister hisses, and Bethany’s blood runs thin.

The awful truth in her sister’s eyes resolves into something else, the soft turning hard and impenetrable at once. No threat of feeling, now, and her rage is somehow far less terrifying. That’s part of her sister’s legend, and for a moment that pulls the fearsomeness back away from Bethany, back away from anything’s done. She’s looking at that famous Hawke fighter spirit, enough to quell cities and quiet gangs and send the qunari packing. Except she’s looking it in the eye.

She knows this character—Champion Hawke, once just _Hawke_ , brawling in the streets—but she’s never been on the receiving end of that, not really. Marian’s never been this kind of angry with her.

She’s never done anything to earn it before.

“I’ve saved your life, right? Have you been keeping count?”

Bethany sets her jaw. Thankful that it’s been a while. Easy not to be her sister’s damsel, her sister’s burden, when she's so safely locked in her tower.  “Do you want a number?” she asks.

_ You didn’t bring me out. _

_ Not even for Mother. _

_ You didn’t even try. Or you’d’ve succeeded, everyone knows that. _

“I’ll spare you the count, if you end it.” Bethany’s sister the Champion puts out a mailed hand, puts on a smile like a snarl. “Let’s call this the last time.”

Thin blood, frozen blood, frozen heart, frozen face. Her body does what it’s used to, without her thinking about it. Bred to politeness, she puts out her hand, and her sister flinches back, snatching her hand out of the air.

“Maker, don’t _touch_ me!”

Marian’s breath is ragged in the air.

“Just,” she says, “just go. Thrask,” she says, and the templar clanks forward, “take my sister home.”

 

 

 

That night: a second lock on Bethany’s door, the metal hammered as Orsino looks on with apology in his soft old eyes. A gift, he says, a precaution, but how can it protect her if it locks from the outside?

“Listen,” Orsino says, before he leaves her. “You said there was a—a mage, there?”

“It _was_ mages,” she says insistently. “Circle robes. And that Templar, I don’t understand—but, yes, it was _us_ , and if I could just ask a few questions—”

“Don’t do that,” he says, sharper with her than he’s ever been. Something darkens in his eyes. When he sees her fear—her _moment_ of fear, it passes quick enough, she’s seen worse today—he pulls back. “Sorry.”

It is a comically inadequate thing to say. It is a scrap of fabric on an open wound of a day. He tries again: “I’m very sorry for what happened to you. Just,” he says, and clears his throat. “Best not to talk too loudly of this. Tough enough for us as it is without the Knight-Commander getting word of dissension among the mages, don’t you think?”

She’s not _asked_ to think.

Quiet, well-behaved Bethany Hawke.

Brotherless, motherless, halfway to sisterless: Bethany Hawke. At the very least, the dead ask and answer no questions. She cannot wonder after Carver, nor Leandra, and the holes they leave in her have clear-cut shapes. Marian, less so. The loss of the world, and its formless things, her half-desires, have no shape to call their own at all.

Locked into her locked room, she rests her forehead on the door and repents praising the thickness of the walls. No one will ever come to this room for any higher purpose ever again. No one will come for her. No one will save her. No one comes to the Circle by choice, and no one leaves. Not in one piece, anyhow.

 

 

 

That night, Marian Hawke slips out of her mage lover’s arms and into Knight-Commander Meredith’s office.

“Right,” she says with little preamble. Meredith’s not a small-talker; it’s one of the few things she respects about the woman. “You’re a horrible old woman, but you’re not wrong about the problem here in Kirkwall.” She shoves papers out of the way to make room for her hands to rest on the Knight-Commander’s desk, watches them go floating off onto the not-all-clean ground. The Knight-Commander’s mouth thins and Hawke takes her pleasure where she can. No pleasure in what she’s about to say.

But she watches her city swell, infected, red in its wounds, and knows the boil needs lancing at both ends.

It is the mage turning abomination she thinks of, the tears in her robes, her awful carnivorous grin, nothing human at all in her face. Not the girl behind her on the sand. The girl on the sand would’ve been prey as much as any of them. Maybe sooner. A tasty morsel, Bethany Hawke.

Tough-meat Marian hardens the last soft part of her heart.

“Blood magic,” she says, and the Knight-Commander smiles.


	10. WAR (PEACE)

**** The really intricate dance is keeping Meredith in her purse and Anders in her bed. But Marian’s light-heeled, and she can keep pace.

Anders sleeps no sounder in her bed than in his chair, in his office. He turns over in her arms, and when she’s not slipping out of his arms he’s slipping out of hers. She rests easy in the knowledge that it’s not love, his fingers slipping and sparking over her skin, no matter what’s in his eyes after the fact. Love is sticky. She can’t afford to get stuck, not right now. Best for both of them that they don’t stay still, that they don’t come home, that they don’t expect to meet each other: yes, Orana opens the door for him but Marian doesn’t keep track of when.

He’s still got his practice. Still slips into her bed smelling of drakestone. Naturally, she expected no less. Leopards have their spots and Anders has his Justice.

Varric tells her, once, to be careful.

Sweet of him.

Varric says _I liked it better when you were shacking up with Rivaini, at least there was only one of her,_ and she trains her eyes on him to make sure the smile’s genuine, the laugh. Varric’s one to talk. There’s at least five versions of everyone every time he picks up a pen.

_Don’t be silly_ , she says. _Don’t you trust me to keep myself safe?_

_That_ gets him laughing properly.

Isabela’s well. She refuses to look back. Isabela’s easily contented, a pot of ale and a brawl and a breath of salt air and a warm body—Fenris’s now. Well, that’s two taking care of each other in her ever-widening shadow. That’s one corner of peace in the city, she can hope. Relative peace, but at least it is peace by night, when the war looms largest.

Yes, peace, just as Anders has Justice: it keeps her moving forward, looking out beyond herself, slipping through her friends’ fingers as swift as her enemies’. Peace at the point of a knife in the shadows but peace all the same. For Kirkwall, balancing the scales.

Meredith tells her once, privately—an unasked secret—of her own sister. Apostate turned abomination.

“I didn’t _ask_ ,” Marian snaps in reply.

 

 

 

Orsino won’t talk to her. Everyone knows he’s sending letters to her sister, but he won’t talk to _her_.

An act of love, Bethany knows, keeping her in the dark. She can see it when he looks at her, his soft eyes. She can tell that she is adored precisely because of his silence: this, if nothing else, unites the people that love her. They don’t want to tell her a thing.

She can even, looking back, believe that somewhere in Kirkwall, an exiled prince might be in love with her, so silent is he, so utterly unseen.

But that’s foolishness. That’s a girl-child in the neglected corner of the room, telling herself stories as the world ends. Same as ever.

So: Orsino indulges her, tells her to make lists of their best and brightest, keeps her within arm’s-length when she’s out of her twice-locked room. His delicate protegé, the prestigiously kept songbird he’s repurposed to sing his records.

Meanwhile, his shadow falls over her paper and shifts. The shape of him, under his skin, refuses to stay put. This, too, is like everyone else that’s loved her: they spend enough time with her, they all turn monstrous in the end.

Dead father, dead brother, shambling, blood-vivified corpse of her mother. Fully human, untouched sister. Now this.

_What is this?_ She shuts her eyes, scribes for him. His eyes are not just soft when they look at her; they are so deeply bloodshot she worries they’ll burst. The lines around them look like seams, built to unravel. He is shorter, slighter, smaller than she, like any elf, but his shadow swallows the room.

In the night, she hears her fellow-mages screaming. It is a time of nightmares. She is quiet behind her two locks. Everything that can happen has already happened.

This has never been true.

 

 

 

The first surprise, on a day like any other, the light streaming in thin and liquid through his narrow window: “Come along,” he says.

He does not look at her. His hand, its joints restless and somehow too-agile, crumples the letter he’s just opened, then in a quick and startlingly vicious movement tears it in two. When he stands, he turns, he slides—shadow slithering—forward, hands empty now, and she can see them trembling. The page at the door, hands now empty with the letter delivered, darts out of the way. She sees the glance the page throws his way. Then she decides she’s seen enough and keeps her eyes on the floor as she follows.

Outside, in the grey of the courtyard, the Knight-Commander shines furiously. Before they reach her, Orsino says:

“Listen very carefully to what the Knight-Commander has to say.”

Listening has always been Bethany’s strong suit. She bites her tongue as the Knight-Commander, tall and fair and furious and flanked by the templar that cuffed Bethany and took her from her home (though he’s looking at his shoes, now, and it seems a waste of time to hate him when he’s merely a face in the ever-thickening crowd), sings her song of blood mages. An old song. As old as the Chant: Kill them all.

Bethany listens. Fear is beyond her. Hysteria is a numbing thing: At least it’s nothing new, is all she can think. Beneath the Knight-Commander’s words, her heart drums with steady controlled panic, drowning out everything else. The whispers of her cohorts quiet as she trails through the crowd, rising, rising. Or the footsteps on the stone.

“The way you two carry on,” drawls a voice as familiar as Bethany’s bones, her skin, and suddenly that, not the Knight-Commander’s, is the only voice she can hear. “People will talk.”

Marian.

Marian now.

Marian who swore never to save her again

Not when the templars first set booted foot over the Circle threshold, not when they put the second lock on her door. Not when their mother died. Only now, Marian flanked by Marian’s friends, Marian’s lovers, _Marian’s_ —Bethany can’t look.

“Why am I not surprised,” she bites out, “to see you here.”

The hero’s entrance. The Champion’s. Her sister doesn’t respond. She’s nothing but another mage overstepping her place, and her voice doesn’t ring out. The crowd swallows up her voice.

She feels eyes on the back of her neck. She doesn’t know if they belong to her sister. She doesn’t look. She doesn’t look.

_Champion,_ she hears, from the Knight-Commander’s own mouth, and she looks up. Now that her sister’s attention is diverted, her head turned. The feathery crop of Marian’s dark hair plastered to her head by sweat and humidity, the line of dirt above the back-collar of her armor. This is the view Bethany remembers best: that of following after. And she’s several steps behind.

Oh, she thinks, as her sister takes a coin purse from Meredith’s hand, the world outside has truly changed beyond her recognition.

Her sister is lost to more than her.  It should stick in her heart. Somewhere to the far left of her, and to the near left of the space Marian’s just left empty, she hears a familiar voice make a sound. Not words, just hollow despair. Anders, her sister’s preferred mage, the—what was he—she wonders what it would have been like, to get to really know her sister’s friends, the apostates that walked at her side, that follow her even now as she plucks money from Templar palms. What _was_ he? She remembers his voice, for it reminded her briefly of their father’s, or maybe it was just the apostasy and the kindness. Another refugee, she remembers, hiding in his Darktown clinic.

A doctor in the dark.

Her eyes widen, too late.

_Listen to what she says_ , she remembers. Orsino had meant Meredith, but Meredith sits back, arms crossed, for once content to be silent and let the world unspool.

She listens to her sister.

“It’s compromise, Anders,” Marian says, and Bethany watches as he shakes his head.

“There can be no compromise.”

This she hears clearly before the air starts to thrum, before a roar too loud to make out voices. Orsino has her by the elbow. Something is changing in Anders’ face, the light awful in his eyes, and it may well be contagious, for when she looks in the Grand Enchanter’s face she doesn’t recognize him.

“Get out of here,” he is shouting into her ear, “take the younger ones, lead the apprentices, go back.”

Terror on his face, shock, and something more. That slithering movement around him, _in_ him: the mark of something alive under the skin of his face.

“What’s _happening?_ ” she asks.

“Kirkwall is against us,” he says—the light is white-blue, then red again, his skin grey under all of it, the red lingering in his eyes. She hasn’t been listening. She hasn’t been looking. “Go,” he says, with real despair. “If the Champion’s with Meredith—“

_Is_ she? Bethany casts an eye about for her sister. Then the air sears and the terrible sky-seeking column of light caught within the Chantry walls bursts. Then: light and ash. Blindness and dust.

A moment of blackness, not like fainting—not like being drugged—still, she comes to on her knees when just a moment before she’d been firm on her feet. Knees aching, palms scraped, but the pain she feels is a disembodied thing. Localized somewhere in her chest.

Above the din, she hears someone screaming. Specific. A man. Hoarse with it, and familiar.

She swallows the ache.

“Go,” says Orsino again, holding onto her with all that’s left of him, but she doesn’t move. Finally, her eyes cast out into the crowd: she finds him the minute she lets herself look.

Even in the dust, that white armor shines. Even with his face in his hands, his whole body concave with grief, he is unmistakable to her.

Rage, and not for her own sake, pulls bile to the top of her throat. She can’t find her sister in the crowd. Not coming to save her, just as promised, but she’s mislaid her husband just as callously as her sister. Her sister, who swore herself to the Chantry for his sake. Took the Chantry’s coin, and their trust, which they gave her for the sake of _him_ —

She knows her sister and thinks she can see a Marianish justice in holding a purse from each faction in each hand. Balance.

Marian does love Kirkwall. More than she loves her blood. Perhaps there’s greater nobility in the feeling when you’ve chosen it, rather than inheriting it by an accident of birth. Like money that way, and there’s nothing Marian understands so well as money.

Bethany is not a town, not a goddess, not a coin and not an institution.

From here, she can see that Sebastian Vael is neither country nor Chantry. Just a man, in as much pain as she.

She turns back to Orsino, who is already pulling at the edges of his mortal shape. Maker, she thinks. But loyalty has chosen her, the monsters and the shadows calling her home. Both he and Meredith may be baying for blood, but only Meredith is baying for _hers_.

No one is coming to save her. Nowhere in Kirkwall offers succor, and the templars are already battering down the sides of the Circle. Fine. She doesn’t move, not even as Orsino swells monstrously, big enough to blot out what’s left of the sun in the sky. This time, she isn’t going anywhere.

 

 

 

The shake of the ground, the reek of sela petrae and ash in the air, the Chantry a tall torch reaching to light the sky red.

Flames everywhere, sky to stony ground, and the souls inside. So many. _Elthina_ —

And Marian Hawke, alive, untouchable, above Sebastian as he sinks to his knees, staring at the red light, staring over him and not seeing him at all.

The scream pulls its way out of him; his mind is elsewhere, everywhere, nowhere. When he closes his eyes, even the darkness there is red-tinged and warm, dancing with the headache lantern aftermath of staring into that light. All that light.

The apostate is gone by the time he opens his eyes. That, he doesn’t see. Not so much as a flurry of black-feathered pauldrons. He only sees Marian go darting after.

The crowd of mages on the steps dispersing, an orderly line of blue robes, furred shoulders, lavender hoods. He thought he’d seen—

Fire in the Chantry, fire all around, and perversely, the thing he sees take shape behind his eyes—for just a flickering second, ephemeral as any one of those flames—is Bethany Hawke. Standing by the Grand Enchanter’s side, the hellish light turning her dark hair cherry-bright. The most beautiful thing he has seen all year ceding to the greatest horror. When he opens his eyes, he’s lost her instantly. He is alone, then, among the dead—Elthina, Andraste, _Mother_ , he thinks, not knowing for whom he calls, for whom he keens—and the disloyal.

Perhaps not all. It is Fenris that lifts him to his feet. Fenris, who lightfooted in and out of services, who would have denied all thoughts of conversion if asked, and so Sebastian had let it be a silent truth between them. The soft light of Andraste’s flame—harshened, now, and now Sebastian knows he’ll never find a way to ask. Isabela doesn’t look at him, doesn’t look at any of them. Varric outright turns his back. These are not his friends, not his warriors. Not his: at the end of the day, he was only here as a facet of her. At the end of the day, he’s only got the one tether.

After Marian he goes.

He finds her, and finds the mage sitting on a crate, his face down, his neck braced low. Ready for the fall of a blade.

Sebastian’s hands clench on the air. He does not carry a sword. Til today, he had not longed for one. But today the bow won’t do. Today he is ready. Today he has less than he had since his family first died—but here is the woman that brought their killers back to him, their rings cut from their fingers, his grandfather’s bow torn back from their grasp. At the end of the world, there is this. If not his Andraste-disgraced wife, then still his savior.

“Hawke,” he says. He cannot fire at this close range without hurting her, and a bow isn’t an executioner’s weapon, after all. Not the way a blade is. Her daggers sit idle, at her hips and in her boots. Her knuckles are white on the hilts, but they don’t move. She never does, until she does. Until she strikes like a snake. “If you’d do the honors?”

She turns to him, and her face is paper-blank.

“What are you talking about?” she asks, and she lifts her hands, and he doesn’t understand. Behind her, the mage’s shoulders tense. Sebastian cannot look at him.

“Do it yourself,” he says. “Administer Kirkwall’s justice where no one else can nor will.” His eyes sting, smoke-hot, shame kindled. “Cut him down here in the alley and throw him in the water.”

Here, at the end of the world, he watches her face settle. The light in her eyes a second untimely dawn. The sky is still red, and she is laughing. Incomprehensibly, she is laughing.

“What is it you think I owe you, Vael, that I would kill my friends for you?”

 

 

 

The blue goes all the way out of his eyes.

Fascinating, she can’t help thinking. The world must really be ending, if something has cut him this deep. Cut all the sky out of his eyes. She had so adored that view of the sky.

“I’ll see him dead,” he vows. “If you won’t deliver him here.”

You fucked my sister, she thinks. All her other lovers at least had the good sense to fuck Kirkwall—and oh, how her city wanted fucking, how her city responds and responds every time. Bedded down in corpses, waking up to blood and ash and rebuilding. She understands this; it’s why the city chose _her_. And on its part, she has to think of the rebuilding, of what will be built in Chantry ash. A world with fewer walls is a more egalitarian world, and thus better, surely, no matter how the walls come down. Once this wretched red light has gone out of the sky. She can’t see her way out, not like this.

It’s hard for her to mourn Mother Elthina when her own mother is still waiting to be mourned. Oh, Marian can feel her tugging at the edges, and Carver too. Maybe even Bethany (yes, easier to think of Bethany among the ghosts). Someday there’ll be time for mourning. When the fires are out. Once she’s put them at. Rolled her shoulders over them or crushed them under her boot.

“I’ll see him dead,” says Sebastian, whom she’d married. Prince Vael. Prince Vael of _Starkhaven_ , looking at her with new and unseeing eyes. “And I’ll see Kirkwall burn. I’ll return from Starkhaven with an army and I’ll see Kirkwall flattened to the ground if you don’t give him up to justice.”

“And me?” she asks.

He looks to the knife in her hand.

“You can still do the right thing,” he says, and involuntarily her lips peel back. The right thing. The image of Bethany captive in the Circle, helpless—or not helpless, she’s never been able to tell which is worse. The demon shifting its hips in the Harriman bed and Sebastian unable to fire. “You always do. Marian.”

A jolt of desire. Even after all this time. That’s what moves her. Spite, bile in the back of her throat. Even now, in the bellyful of fire.

She throws the knife at his feet.

“Do it yourself, if you’re so keen,” she snaps. “And go through me to do it.”

He doesn’t move.

“No?” She laughs; she knew. Even now. At least she knows him, knows where it hurts, knows how to make him move, if not to direct him. She’s always had the least grip on him, of anyone she’s ever known, of anyone she’s ever loved. It’s satisfying to make the hurts land. She can’t help it. The taste of ash in her mouth, of rust, adrenaline. “Coward. You couldn’t kill a demon when it told you the right thing. You couldn’t kill your family’s killers. You’re not looking for justice. You’re looking to save the precious heir of Starkhaven. So precious they threw it all the way across the Marshes. Good luck going back, I’m sure they’ll _love_ you right now.”

He looks at her, level, with those new eyes.

“Then our debt is paid,” he says.

Despite herself, despite the time, she shivers. Not with desire, this time. There, that’s a relief, isn’t it, that her body is reacting the proper way? She’s always been so skint on propriety. Mother always said.

Oh, Mother.

Oh, she thinks, oh, for the family Hawke.

Anders rustles—she’d nearly forgotten him. Here, at her other side, hastening swift footfalls. Varric. Fenris. Aveline, even though the guard is doubtless massing elsewhere. Her Isabela, oh, Maker, how can she speak of things thrown away when Isabela is here, and beautiful to the last? All of them, gathered, watchful.

“Orsino’s turned abomination,” says Aveline. “The mages barred the doors to the Circle once Meredith invoked the Right of Annulment.”

“What are you going to do, Hawke?” Varric asks, careful.

She says, “There’s a way to make amends.”

She sees Anders tense. When she puts her hand on his shoulder, fingers pulling down through the feathers, she can feel him drawn like strings. With fatigue on his face, he looks up at her.

“Compromise isn’t dead,” she says. “Not yet. You can still fight to make it right. But you’ll have to fight, and do it on the same side as the rest of us. To make sure there’s a Kirkwall left.”

In a trice, she’s pulled Meredith’s purse off her belt and tucked it into his. Not for the money. That’s the last thing he wants now, the last thing he needs.

When he looks up at her, she wonders if some things are worse than an execution.

But there’ll be a Kirkwall for him to haunt, in the morning, after the battle.

She tries to see her way into the Circle, into regret. As much as she tries to see her sister, all she can see is the demon. Violet-skinned and reaching out. Never her sister at all, once she’d put her knife through its throat.

“If we don’t kill the monsters,” she says, “there’ll be nobody left to save the monsters.”

When he stands, at last, she thinks: There’s nothing she can’t do. Good, then. Kirkwall will be standing in the morning.

She takes him by the shoulders. Speaks to them and to the rest. “Go,” she says. “Hold the streets.” It’s work to smile. She manages to raise it anyway, like a battle-banner, high and uncompromising. “I’ll return to you in two shakes and we can count our kills.”

When they disperse, she exhales and lets it fall. She doesn’t want them running after her when she takes to the Circle.

One monster at a time.

 

 

 

_Orsino’s turned abomination._

Dark hair on the wind.

Sebastian turns back toward the steps.

The crowd gets in his way. He moves slow, elbowed this way and that, caught by feet and fists and screams. No one here is concerned with the well-being of the heir of Starkhaven. Not even the heir in question. 

Once he’s arrived, the thing that was Orsino is already dead. Isn’t that always the way it’s been, ever since he’s arrived in Kirkwall: just missing the fight, just in time to step over the corpses. Now he has to move around dead templars just to make his way up the steps.

He loved a woman for bringing him news and rings of the dead, once. For making him safe, once.

_Safe_ is a lie. A lie in the Chantry, dead with Elthina. A lie in Kirkwall, running away with Marian—who is darting up the steps ahead of him, her coterie at her heels. Marian’s always moved faster than anyone he’s ever known. Always toward the same end—to kill monsters. Her throwing-dagger in the throat of the monster bloating on the Circle steps.

Her shadow slants over her sister’s kneeling body, at the monster’s side.

“Get out of the way, Bethany,” he hears her say, low and warning. “I’ve left something of mine. Just a little to the left there.”

Bethany Hawke looks up, that mouth he’d kissed now caught in a rictus of grief. (Even now, he can’t stop _looking_. His heart is full of ghosts; in their dead company she is even more fully and strikingly alive.)

“Get away from me,” she says. “Get away from _him_.”

“You see, Champion.” The Knight-Commander now, feet armored-loud on the steps, her great sword luminous at her back. The air around her casts red with the same unnatural light that—he closes his eyes, ash in them. “They really are all the same.”

“Meredith.”

“Thank you,” says the Knight-Commander, and a look of pale fury washes over Marian’s face.

“I didn’t do it out of duty for _you_. I kill monsters where I find them. For Kirkwall.”

The Knight-Commander smiles her blade-thin smile: “You’ve found one.”

She moves her hand, fingers catching the light in their gauntlet. Toward—

“Maker, Meredith,” says Marian with more disgust than outrage, “we’re at war and you’re worried about _this?_ ” She doesn’t look down, not behind her. “First priority’s to gut the strong, not the weak.”

His comprehension severs as neatly as if it had met with her knives. He doesn’t hear her right. She can’t. Can’t possibly mean this.

A muscle twitches in Bethany’s jaw, but still she does not move.

“She put herself in his way,” says the Knight-Commander. “I saw. And who do you think did all of this?”

The dead Templars on the steps. He should be furious, in the name of the Maker. He should be terrified of the girl, breaking Andraste’s covenant. But she kneels like any penitent, hands open and even when Meredith places a hand on the back of her neck and pulls her to her feet, her hands are empty even of light. Her eyes are closed. She has a look on her face that he’s seen on statues of Andraste Herself, the untouchable face She wore to the pyre.

“You kill the weak so they can’t get stronger, Champion. Any exterminator knows that. If you’d killed more rats, you might have saved your mother getting bit.”

Marian Hawke—wife—Champion— _neither_ —stills her face stone-stiff and lets her hands fall to her knife’s belt.

He doesn’t have to understand (and he doesn’t) to _know_.

Marian’s knife is out. He won’t reach her in time. But he doesn’t have to reach.

No one else he loves will die today.

(So he loves her. Very well.)

“Andraste preserve us,” he breathes, which is confession enough: She knows his heart already. Its sins and its specific redemption, in his sight.

So it is that he draws his bow, and he calls up the steps, above the din:

“An arrow in your throat, Marian, if you move.”

She blinks.

And Bethany’s own eyes open, seek him out, and her astonishment is potent enough that it could send him to his knees, if only her life wasn’t dependent on his standing. The burning city turns almost beautiful, reflected in the amber of her eyes. Everything she touches is capable of turning beautiful, sanctified.

Even him, if he gets the chance to touch her again.

His hands are steady on his bow, the fletching itching his fingertips. “You’re still here,” says Marian. “I thought you were off to call up an army.”

In her voice, Starkhaven is a distant joke, and its prince even moreso.  So be it. He’s not here for Starkhaven. “I don’t need an army,” he says, “to kill one wicked woman.”

She smiles, eyes lightless. “Which one?”

“Don’t touch her,” he says, and the smile turns savage, and Bethany Hawke shifts suddenly and abruptly in Meredith’s grip.

“Get fucked,” says the Champion of Kirkwall, is all the Champion has time to say before her sister smashes an elbow into the Knight-Commander’s face.

It’s mostly elbow. A little bit of spark in the palm. A little bit of ice at the fingertips. A little bit of tempest underfoot. A little bit proving the Knight-Commander right about mages—a _very little_ bit. He hears Meredith wail, part pain and mostly rage, as Bethany goes running. Into his path—past it—past him. Without stopping.

So be it. With her behind him, he can stand, armored, in her way.

“Take her,” snarls Marian, “and enjoy it while you can. If you won’t come for me, I’ll come for you.”

He opens his mouth. The Knight-Commander cuts him off:

“Champion.” She wipes ice out of her eyes. Open, they are magic-red. “I’m calling you to account for this.”

Marian—at the end of the world—rolls her eyes as she draws her knives. She says nothing more to Sebastian before she turns her back.

Around him, Kirkwall burns, unconcerned by him.

Kirkwall burns, but does not seek out Bethany.

He sees her ahead of him, ducking behind a building, a blur of blue and fur and brass and bright sparks trailing in the air after.

The world ends, careless of them: he follows her into the blaze, and although she does not turn, following her feels like an act of faith. As he moves forward, his steps promise a path toward a higher good.


	11. rebuilt

_“How’s this story going to end?”_

_“They’re going to say, The sun rose on Kirkwall the next morning.”_

_“A dead abomination on the Circle steps in Grand Enchanter robes. A statue screaming in the courtyard with the Knight Commander’s face. Corpses littering the streets—the stairs— _”__

_“ ‘The world was a little stranger. The next days, and weeks, and months would take rebuilding. There would be funerals, wakes, droughts poured on the ground in the memory of strangers and friends. But the morning after the battle, Kirkwall woke up with the sun. Which shone in the sky, like it had the day before and would the next.’ _”__

_“How can you be so sure, Varric?”_

_“Because I’ll write it.”_

_Marian Hawke’s eyes flash, canny._

_“And who’ll be in the tale all the way to the end?”_

 

 

 

The record says: Isabela left in the thick of battle. Always a fighter but never a builder; simple as this: Marian had looked over her shoulder when the fighting was dying down, once Meredith had screamed and drove her red sword into the stone like a vein of solid lyrium and shattered on the spot, and seen no sight of Isabela anywhere. Left in the night, her thief, her pirate. Lightfooted as ever, lighthearted (Varric can gift her that, a gift of a lie).

Aveline survived to lead her guard, to direct her square-shouldered men and women through building as much as buffeting.

The record says: Anders fought furiously at Hawke’s side, springing ahead of her in front of every bolt of crossbow and blast of magic. As though he wished to take them all himself. And yet, he survived the night—and when he caught a crossbow bolt through the shoulder and fainted on the field, it was Fenris of all people that dragged his body out of the fray. That it was a templar, even, who pulled him into the shadows. That it was Merrill, turning her face from the fray, who administered to him. (Easier, perhaps, than looking at the bloodshed and blood-compulsion. Easier than wondering who was on what side.)

The record does not continue through the morning, through Marian Hawke wandering the streets, from Lowtown to Hightown, from the Chantry crater to the viscount’s seat, wondering, wondering. The headless city, holding its breath. As Varric, hurting, hoping for her, holds his.

No storytellers followed her to the Circle steps. She made sure of that. Meredith is dead, and lyrium statues tell no tales. Sebastian Vael has left for Starkhaven. Nobody has named and tallied the dead mages, at least not yet.

Bethany Hawke has no place in this record.

 

 

 

_The sun came up in the morning after all._

 

 

 

But there is another record. Witnesses, blinking out into the wreckage, in that sun that so predictably rose, flinching from their questioners—until they saw the statue of Meredith, until they started to believe that the knife might not land immediately in their throat. At which point, they make lists, they make names. Those present and those struck through.

Strike through: Orsino, his body deflating on the cobbles, looking something awfully like an elf again.

Strike through his scribe.  Not numbered among the dead, but n owhere to be found among the living.

 

 

 

_The sun rose. And despite all, it shone._

 

 

 

Around the corner. Gasping for breath. Campaigns with her sister, a lifetime ago, taught her to find the crookedest alleys, the darkest most unwatched spaces. Here, the screams recede a little, the light stops slicing into her eyes, and her hands, pressed against the stone, lose their casting-itch. She misses her staff. She misses her sister.

She was saved. From her former habitual savior.

And now—she hadn’t dared hope, hadn’t believed, not after all her time locked in her room and unattended—she hears footsteps approach and slow. Hears them round the corner and shuts her eyes tight, palms scraping rock. Opens her shut eyes just a little.

“Bethany,” says the prince of Starkhaven. At the end of the world, she has the space in her head to think, _this is ridiculous_. Prince Sebastian Vael, a dream catching up to her far too late.

“Why did you run?” he asks.

Ash has smeared over the ice-white metal, shrapnel denting its once-flawless surface. The gold catches the warped light even through a layer of grime.

“You didn’t come back,” she says. Nobody comes back, nobody comes to the Circle by choice. Not that she blamed him. Not that she’s altogether sure he’s here now.

Not all of him, anyway. He doesn’t look much like himself—or any recorded version of himself, not like the old portraits and not like the old posters and not like the sketches scratched on yellow-paper to commemorate the Champion’s marriage. (Marian had always lent herself well to scribbled illustration, the wiry frame and the short black thatch of hair, but Sebastian’s smoothness had smudged the ink. Bethany had kept the clippings, for a time.) None of those had ever drawn him with dirt on his face or tears in his bloodshot eyes.

He looks like the version she unearthed. After a night in her bed. A ragged-etched version only she is allowed to see.

She reaches out to him, hands remembering—then, flinching, doesn’t let them alight. Her fingers tremble in the air, looking for purchase. This time, at least, it’s not her fault. The sight of him tugs on every seam of her, even now, more than ever now, now that she has been without him for so long: _Look what Kirkwall has done to him,_ she thinks; _look what Marian has done to both of them_.

“Are you all right?” she asks, and he laughs. Hoarse, from screaming.

“Kirkwall is burning,” he says, eyes dark and half-mad with despair. “As it must, now. The Chantry, and—”

His breath catches, harsh in the back of his throat, and her hands go to him. They cannot help it. Her fingertips land, tremulous, along the rough edge of his jaw. Her fingertips are dirty, but the marks they leave are indistinguishable from the grime already limning his skin, the same ash, the salt.

His eyes close. His face turns into the palm of her hand, desperately seeking succor. His own hands rises to clasp over hers, vow-tight. “Yours and Andraste’s are the only cleansing flame.”

“I don’t deserve this,” she said, flinching. A devout’s flinch. There’s nowhere to go. Her shoulders collide with the wall.

He shakes his head—no, she thinks, see? See, I don’t—

Then his mouth, a repudiation of her words and of his faith, scraping sudden and shocking over her own.

Oh, she thinks, and stops feeling the boil of flame and magic, stops seeing the bloodied sky or the glint of her sister’s knife. His hand coiled in her hair, cupping the back of her neck, wipes away the bruise of the Knight-Commander’s grip. His mouth tastes of ash and salt, dry and acid with fear. It doesn’t matter. They are marked with the same dirt, the same griefs.

The world is ending? Well, she repudiates it. She reaches up, tangling her hands in his hair, pulling him close and closer. She will live, if only for this. He pulls back, shuddering, and the feel of his body against hers is the only thing she has left to love in the world.

“I submit myself utterly to your hands, Bethany Hawke,” he says.

In the clear ugly light, she looks into the face of the only thing she had ever really wanted, the only thing she had ever come near to having for herself.

“Leave here with me,” he says, and before he can end his sentence, her mouth is on his again, seeking escape, seeking him, saying, silent, _yes, yes_.

“Never leave me.”

“Never again,” he says against her lips, “nowhere in the world,” and she breaks away to laugh, wild and astonished: the world is hers, now, isn’t it. Hers to see. Everywhere but Kirkwall.

 

 

 

She awakens at sunrise, in a traveller’s inn on the far side of town. 

They had taken one horse from the burning Circle stables, ridden it to a froth along the back roads. Her roads, his purse, past the harbor gates, the flames of Kirkwall at their back. She had wrapped her arms around him, trying to find chinks in the rattling metal of his armor, and tried not to think of the last time she’d left a place, the fire always at her back.

She awakens beside him, but chastely, clothed. Her shift. His trousers, the fine cloth of his white shirt stained with sweat and ash around the neck. Her mage’s robes discarded on the road, their furred epaulets and many clasps decaying in a gutter. His hands shivering over the clasps in the smoky night, on a quiet part of the road. His lips brushing too quickly over the nape of her neck as he pulled back her hair, as he cloaked her shoulders. Only these things, these promises of life beyond the grief.

But in the room the griefs had come first, and a wave of exhaustion too deep to withstand. She blinks now at the key on the bedstand, remembers their names in the guestbook: Lord and Lady Amell.

She had wept in the room, but only after she’d said the name, when no one was looking. No one but him, with his hand between her shoulders. As had he. With the doors closed, the windows bolted.

She waits, now, for him to wake, as the sunlight puddles in the room and gilds the red of his hair, his lashes, the edge of beard at his normally shorn-smooth cheek. Here in this poor bed with her: a prize and a relic, a monument to her sins that sees her as a salvation. She reaches out, and at once, he startles awake, catching her wrist with a grip that crushes to the bone. She gasps, and his hand goes slack, eyes wide and blue and instantly awake. All instant contrition: “I’m sorry, love,” he says, pressing his mouth to the inside of her wrist. “Forgive me.”

She does, at once. She knows what he fears: the knife in the dark, the same dispatch as his parents. The prince of Starkhaven will always be under threat. If that’s what he is, now. She hardly knows, hardly better than she knows what to call herself, if not Champion’s sister, if not Circle mage. Only: alive.

The knife has already come for her. She’s weathered assassinations, kidnappings. Her own sister—

“Forgive me,” he beseeches again, and she says, aloud, “I do.”

“That’s a sweet thing,” he says. “A sweet vow.”

A flush rises in her cheeks. She dreams of this, too—with her sister’s husband. But only in a church now burnt. And never made flesh.

Less a hostage than she’s ever been, she presses her cheek against his and feels the rise of heat, magic in her palms and mortal everywhere else. For once, fear is nowhere to be found. “You’re safe,” she says, words she’s never had cause to say aloud before, “and so am I.”

If she says it, it will be true. Like a story: better for the telling.

She had started to believe that. Here is her prince, after all.

“I mean it,” he says. “Be mine.”

“I am.”

“My bride.”

“You’re—”

“What am I?” he asks sharply, alert to her answer, the lines of his body drawn suddenly taut. She understands, as she always understands crisis. How his faith has always teetered on the edge of it.

“Wed.”

Easier to be absolved, to think of the specter in the room as a purely wicked thing—a muddy footstep on the Chantry carpet, a knife on a defenseless throat. How her wickedness purifies them in its absence.  Marian is holiest as their ghost.

His eyes darken. “I’ll see it annulled.”

“On what grounds?” she says, heart thumping. How much renunciation can he bear?

He smiles. It is terrible, cold. But not cold to her. “We never consummated any vows,” he says, and with that, he sits up and kisses her, fierce and thorough.

“Only you,” he says into her mouth. Pulling back, he kisses her temple, the edge of her hair. “Bethany Hawke, bride of my flesh and my spirit.”

Yes, they come to each other compact in their sins already. But this morning is no storm: it is the calm that comes after, and they face each other clear-eyed. It is without despair that she slides her body into his arms, without frenzy that she unlaces the neck of his shirt. She pulls it over his head. She has never seen him without his clothes.

Instead, she finds a second shirt so rough it scrapes her fingers. “A punishment,” he says, catching her fingers, kissing the tips. “No more. We have nothing to regret.

“My salvation,” he calls her, pulling the coarse shirt over his head.

It has scraped at his flesh, but the body beneath is beautiful to her, pale brown where the sun hasn’t touched. She presses closer, stroking her hands over the flat hard planes of his chest, wanting him to feel only sweetness. Sparks shimmer along her fingertips. Healing was never her specialty, but this is something else: she lets herself ignite against him softly like the candles in the Chantry, a contained flame. A force that could burn the world if she unleashed it, dedicated to something good. And oh, Maker, the sound he makes is good.

He pulls her in, clutching desperately at her backside, rucking up the cloth of her shift. Beneath it, she is bare, and his fingers sliding between her legs is magic of its own.

Deft and clever, he unstrings her, until she is a gasping, helpless, boneless thing. She bites a moan into his neck, and his unbusied hand tangles itself once again in her hair, pulling, teasing, painless. Her tongue follows the tense lines of his throat to his collarbone, his shoulder, down the archery-tense muscle, wanting to learn every inch of him by sight and touch and taste.

Once she is shaking and wordless against his hand, he pulls it back, only so far as it will allow him to pull off her gown. Pliant against him, she lets him lay her softly back against the bed, cheek to the inn’s shockingly soft pillows—next to the Circle, anyway. Next to the Circle, the whole world is silk. Even she, unspun.

He looks down at her body, reverent as she’s ever seen. Every inch of her an altar under his gaze.

He says to her, very seriously, “Before—“

“Yes?”

Her voice is very soft. Still, even one word seems to shudder over him, prickling goosebumps up over his skin.

“Our night together. You deserved better.”

“I wanted _you_.”

He meets her eyes. “And you have me,” he says, “and if a reprobate’s history has taught me anything, _I can do better_.”

And it is his turn to draw his hands over her, to learn her inch by inch with his fingers and rewrite her print by print with his tongue. Her breasts cupped in his hands. His tongue and teeth edging the peaks of her nipples. His kiss on the swirl of her navel, the curve of her belly, the soft flesh of her thighs, and at last, between them.

She had thought his fingers clever. (They still are.) He sings new revelation into her, until the soles of her feet go numb and the unlit candle on the side table ignites and promptly melts to liquid wax on its metal plate.

Then, at last.

She had wanted to be the one to remove his trousers as well. Next time. Now she lays back, soaked and trembling, as he dispatches and returns to her. Still, she looks, learns, and this time she knows what she wants.This time, as he draws her knee up to her chest and slides into her—slow and sure and agonizingly _right_ —she looked him in the face, and she knows him, inch by inch.

 

 

 

Now, after. Now the sun is risen and his arm is heavy on her shoulder, slung over her breast, when she wakes. She opens her eyes and breathes in the new day. She can’t smell ash in the air, not from here, and the sky outside the window is only blue and white.

His eyes are open when she looks up. His hand sliding to the curve of her waist.

“All that time in Kirkwall,” he says, marveling, “I could not hear the Maker’s voice, though he was calling in my ear.”

“Is that what this is?” she asks, sliding a leg between his and watching his face draw tensely shut, feeling his body tremble once more against her.

She can move storms under her skin—and, it would seem, under his.

“I understand, now,” he says, and he kisses her, hard.

The world is so very new today.

“Where are we going?” it occurs to her to ask. She’s fairly certain she knows, but she wants to hear him say it. He laughs, startled, and she _does_ know. Still, she waits for the word to exhale:

“Starkhaven, of course.”

The breath rushes out of her, hard and giddy. Yes: another place she’s never seen, with another place left behind to burn at her back. But she’d never gone anywhere protected before—not by the state, anyway.

She draws her fingers over the prince’s face, all the way down to his throat and to his chest. Sebastian’s.

“And never coming back,” she says, like a promise. Relief is the first thing she feels. She tucks her face into his neck and doesn’t let herself feel a second.

“Oh,” he says, and her ear against his throat warps his voice odd and dark and new, “we’ll come back.”

“But we’ll be better. Stronger.”

She pulls back. He takes her hands.

“No one will be able to touch us, my Bethany. When we return to Kirkwall, your shoes won’t so much as touch the filthy ground.”

_We_.

She pulls in close, tucks herself up compact enough for him to wrap around, and lets herself take heart. She’s found consolation in less reassuring places than this, than his lips on her ear, his hand twining with gentle restlessness through her hair. His free hand draws a single finger slow and exquisite down the dip of her spine and she is exactly where she has always dreamed of being.

“And when we leave,” he says with a voice like speaking catechism, “we won’t have to worry about looking back.”

He kisses her temple, and suddenly she is more frightened of the future than she has ever been of her own life.

“There will be no Kirkwall in sight, once we’re through.”


End file.
